Impact

The US just passed the Orphan bill. This means that unless images have a watermark on them when posted to an open viewing site such as flickr they could be downloaded by a third party and used without permission. So, for example, a company could download one of your images to use in an advertising campaign instead of hiring a photographer to take the image and then claim that they could not contact the creator and were able to use this image because of the Orphan bill. The impact of this is worldwide not just in the US as everyone uses flickr or some similar type of site for posting images for the world to see. I am not slamming any of these photo posting sites, it is up to everyone posting to make sure their contact information is embedded in the images along with some type of watermark is visible on the image itself. It is indeed unfortunate for those of us trying to make a living at this wonderful business that a bill like this can be slipped in while everyone is waiting to hear about a billions of dollars bailout that died on the floor. It will impact us all!