Protect your creative works!

This is a daft act. Its premise is based on the user of the work performing a 'diligent search' to find the original copyright holder. Who is to determine whether a search is 'diligent' or not? The way I see this it's going to force artists to safeguard their copyright as viciously corporations look after their trademarks. Normally if someone uses our work we can decide for ourselves whether to take action or not. Now if there's a chance someone will source our work from someone else who got it from someone else, they'll then be able to legally use it with little financial risk because it got too hard to find out the original owner. So in effect we'll have no choice but to send 'cease and desist' letters to every poor bugger who uses our work whether we like it or not just in case someone down the track decides to do a lazy search.

And how does this work for countries without a register of copyrights? Most signatories of the Bern Convention don't have any such provision within their legal system (Australia, for one). Does this mean the rest of the world is going to be forced to comply with yet another stupid American copyright scheme? Or does it mean American businesses are free to rip off our work as they see fit because international conventions mean f*ck all now?

And what happens if the chain of use includes a lot of 'fair use' sources? We can't stop students or news reporters from using our work. Yet if someone else sees it on one of their web pages and thinks "Oooh... pretty!" and steals it they can claim it was too hard for their poor little brains to find us and ask permission.

Feh. Stick with the Berne convention and include the Moral Rights provision. These laws protected artists without giving too much power to multinationals. And it didn't include any b*llshit like this.