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Tuesday, July 21, 2015

legalizing copyright infringement

Congress is considering legalizing copyright infringement (this will affect anyone who creates visual content, especially those who post art and photos online). The Copyright Office has asked for letters regarding visual art in this legislation.

Please consider writing a letter to The Copyright Office. There's an easy online form here: http://copyright.gov/policy/visualworks/comment-form

Let them know if you think it's important that you're in control of how and by whom your art or photos are used, and that you don't want others to profit without your knowledge or consent.

*** The Deadline For Letters Is July 23 ***


Here are some basic facts (from The Illustrator's Partnership):

   * "The Next Great Copyright Act" would replace all existing copyright law.

   * It would void our Constitutional right to the exclusive control of our work.

    * It would "privilege" the public's right to use our work.

   * It would "pressure" you to register your work with commercial registries.

    * It would "orphan" unregistered work.

   * It would make orphaned work available for commercial infringement by "good faith" infringers.

    * It would allow others to alter your work and copyright these "derivative works" in their own names.

   * It would affect all visual art: drawings, paintings, sketches, photos, etc.; past, present and future; published and unpublished; domestic and foreign.

The demand for copyright "reform" has come from large Internet firms and the legal scholars allied with them. Their business models involve supplying the public with access to other people's copyrighted work. Their problem has been how to do this legally and without paying artists.

The "reforms" they've proposed would allow them to stock their databases with our pictures. This would happen either by forcing us to hand over our images to them as registered works, or by harvesting unregistered works as orphans and copyrighting them in their own names as "derivative works."

The Copyright Office acknowledges that this will cause special problems for visual artists but concludes that we should still be subject to orphan works law.

Want to know more? Check out this post from The Illustrator's Partnership:
http://ipaorphanworks.blogspot.com/2015/07/the-return-of-orphan-works-part-1-next.html

Thank you for your help!

Monday, July 13, 2015

garden bunny

The Illustration Friday prompt this week is: garden. I've been in a bunny drawing mood lately, and bunnies like gardens, so I sketched this image:


I had already emphasized the bunny, butterfly, bee, snail, and worm (and their plants) with black line, but decided to add color to them too. This is the result:


It looks a bit more like a poster with types of plants than gardens, but I like it. Then I decided to take away the line to see what it would look like with just the color:


The three images are the same, and yet different. Not sure which one I like best, but I do like them all for different reasons.

Experimenting with art is fun! But it doesn't always yield an answer to what's best or what direction to keep experimenting with. Guess that means more experimenting with all of these, and more!

Thursday, July 9, 2015

alligator vs. bunny part two: sharp teeth and a challenge

I couldn't resist drawing what happens after the alligator tries to eat the bunny in the picture I drew last week. (Both images are from an old picture book dummy that I'm revising.)

Since the Illustration Friday prompt this week is: sharp (as in, "Look at those sharp alligator teeth!"), it seemed like a perfect fit for IF too. Here's what happens after you turn the page from last week's image:


The bunny is hoping that the alligator will accept her challenge instead of having her for lunch!

I changed the alligator slightly from last week, so that the mouth is longer and more alligator-ish. Here's a close up of the bunny:


I used a reverse type speech bubble because when it was white with black type, it got lost among all the white alligator teeth. I wanted both the text and the teeth to stand out.

What do you think happens next? Do you think the bunny will still be lunch? Or do you think the bunny will outsmart the alligator?