I've heard of this and it is a scarier than shit concept. >.<

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...Just us normal girls, talking about dressing up as fictional boys and humping each other for giggles. Yup. Completely normal....XDDD

old hat

its not going to be a law - the legislation fell through...

it'd be too much of a hazzle to administrate - i mean, come on, some private company to handle ALL american original content? they would be drowned in emails with "homg, check out this original character i just made.. he's mine, write that down somewhere! k thx bye!"

besides - the legislation DOES NOT allow art theft... it simply states that ppl are ok to use it if there are no ways of contacting you and getting permission - if you do then later come into contact then you can still ask for retroactive payments or whatever for them having used your stuff

and the copyright forfeiting? that'll still only apply after the 50 years of automatic copyrighting which will still apply... the proposal is basically just to make so that after those 50 years the copyright would only remain in power if you paid some company that would keep an eye on all the copyright holdings a dollar a year...

so, a lot of fuss about nothing

from what i understood then the legislation was primarily aimed at situations like - wedding photographer who takes your pics at wedding, then later you wanna do copies, but cant find photographer to get copyright permissions (its his pics, you'd be artthiefing it if you just copied it, even if its of you) - and this proposal would have made that kinda situations ok go do it anyway on, since there'd be no way of contacting the guy

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For Shai Hulud - or Daphne behind the dumpster with whipped cream, kumquats, three midgets and a gallon or so of kumquat liqour...
Psiotechniqa - the webcomic (NSFW, violence, gore, sex, people called Bob)

Ehhh....

It's not as bad as all that.

A few things to point out about this. One, this is only in the talking stages. Congress is holding hearings...so it seems that they are only *thinking* about writing up a bill. That said, most of anything that gets dreamt up doesn't get that far in congress.

Most likely, it will die in comittee or something else along the way. Most bills and proposals don't get passed. Seriously.

Even if it DOES somehow get passed, it won't affect anyone on DA or their works here. Why? Because we are covered by various copyright laws and such. It would be quite painful to break it all down, but in a nutshell anything you have published after 2002 is protected for 70 years after your death.

Links of (factual) information:
DA News: [link]

Copyright Term and Public Domain chart: [link]

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Please stop talking...


...I have had too much of the Stupid today. Please wait until tomorrow to say these things so my tolerance has refreshed.