If copyright protection is important to you, it is
absolutely critical that you respond by
January 31, 2017 to the survey that the new Librarian of Congress, Dr. Carla Hayden has posted on
Survey Monkey.
Dr. Hayden would like to gut U.S. copyright protection. She supports the arguments of the tech community that every image that appears on the Internet should be FREE. In October she
removed Maria Pallante as Register of Copyright. Everyone in the photography industry believed that Pallante was very effective and working for the good of image creators.
In choosing crowd sourcing as a way to gather data it seems clear that Dr. Hayden hopes the number of respondents who oppose copyright protection will overwhelm those who depend on copyright protection for their livelihood. This could provide her with an excuse to appoint a new Register of Copyright who will make copyright registration more difficult and work to gut the little protection that now exists.
Past experience has shown that the tech community is very effective at organizing and sending the Copyright Office an overwhelming number of responses to copyright inquiries. Thus, to have any hope of influence there needs to be a huge response from photographers and photo agents.
The four survey questions are very open ended. Nancy Wolff, DMLA Counsel has provided some
suggested responses. While it is always better to provide personal responses to such a questionnaire, it is better to copy Wolff’s responses than to do nothing. The number of responses will be critical.
If you simply copy and paste Wolff’s recommended responses you should be able to complete the survey in less than 10 minutes. If you have more time please make your own comments, but one way or another respond to the survey.