Ongoing Copyright Changes - Real and Proposed

As a photographer who posts pictures onto my web site I know that people will "lift" them and use them without asking first. If you post some people will just use them for making money regardless of what you want - there always will be some people who will do that. Others will use them due to lack of money to pay for them, philosophy (people oppressed me, I will steal to get back at them), ignorance (its posted, it must be free to use) or numerous other reasons. I actually allow people to use my images for commentary, school, and other non-fee uses (if they charge others in any manner then it is commercial and they must pay to use images, and I give them at 300 DPI or higher than the 72 DPI on the web site) for both web sites, papers, presentations etc.

The web broadcast industry will be hit with lots of new fees on July 15, 2007 - unless a judge intervenes - requiring them to pay for songs being "broadcast" over the internet - at least in the US based businesses. Those hosted outside will, of course, ignore paying any fees since the US has no control over them. Since the fees is based on statistics - which anyone knows can be skewed to present any view based on the universe that was polled - of use many will have to shut down since the hobby / business they pursue is not designed to make them any real money. This is due to administrative degree stating that people will pay a percentage based on the total possible viewing audience of that radio internet station. Numbers matter. Paying .015 cents per song does not sound like much - until you are faced that someone else has determined that 150,000 POSSIBLE listeners could hear it so you get to pay $2,250 a month to the "artist" for the privilege of playing it online. Play 1080 songs a day (15 per hour if each are 3 minutes long) and your bill becomes 2 million 430 thousand dollars a month!

People would likely have to cut down to 7 to 9 songs an hour, advertise more, in order to break even (less songs to play due to fees) and the actual "artist" will see only 5 to 7 % of the fees collected - most will just go to the record labels who REALLY own the songs via contract to the artist.

And the music industry is the only one getting this special treatment.

What if they applied the same logic to photographs seen on the web so that every time a photo is viewed the photographer got .015 cents? It is not the same? You hear the song and it is gone, visual looking then gone is no difference.

Why not apply the same logic to a billboard - 60,000 cars go by one every day so the photographer should get 60,000 x .015 cents every day for that image?

In this manner you see that the Copyright Board made a big mistake in singling out this - at the insistence of the Music Industry - vs the old (reasonable) system of a flat fee per year into a fund to distribute to artists.

Add onto this new fee structure the May 2007 proposal to alter laws of infringement by Attorney General Roberto Gonzales so that just thinking about using software, music, images etc would land you in jail - you do not even have to actually distribute anything just have it in your possession and they THINK you are going to share with others - plus whole lot of other changes  (http://news.com.com/8301-10784_3-9719339-7.html) so that you have to worry about every item for the next 70 years (length of basic copyright AFTER a person dies, a corporation has rights from 70 to 105 years) and you could live your whole life with the threat of going to jail for using something was was created WHEN YOU WERE BORN.