--- On Sat, 5/31/08, Luke -Jr [email protected] wrote:
On Friday 30 May 2008, Billy Crook wrote:
How *fair* do you think it is that you are able today, to spend hundreds of hours on some work only to discover (after you've spent thousands, millions of your own money) to bring your idea to market, that there was some prior work with copyright that you had NO WAY to know about, but yet now, all your time, and all your money is in vain.
While I'm no fan of copyright law, this is FUD and can never happen with copyrights. Copyrights only deal with copying information. If you spent hundreds of hours working on it, and didn't copy it,copyright cannot get in your way.
Basically, it is impossible to copy something (violating copyright) if you don't know it exists.
And the "Orphan Works Act" deals only with *known* artwork. You *know* the artwork exists. *You know you didn't create it.* The "Orphan Works Act" isn't desired by creators, it is desired by people who haven't created anything wanting to profit off other people's creations.
Billy Crook is clearly talking about *patents*, not copyrights, in his paragraph above.