I know I have been incredibly slack in updating for months now. There has been a lot going on, including trying to get my back to a more working condition again. I will post soon....Promise!

The reason I am posting today is that I just ran into something incredibly disturbing. It seems that there is legislation up for approval -- again! -- that would require all of us to register EACH AND EVERY WORK OF ART for a fee, with one or multiple registry companies in order for it not to be considered "orphaned." What does that mean or why should I care? you might ask. Orphaned works, in the case of this legislation passing, means that anyone who wants to can use your unregistered work with no hope of recourse from you. You put a photo up on the web and someone likes it. They take the image and use it for a greeting card. They make thousands...millions. You have no right to your own photo or any of the profits because you did not pay to register it as yours...or someone else registered it as their own. Same goes for sketches, writings, etc. We, the original creators, are out of luck and subject to the buzzards who should be our livelihood, but instead end up picking our creative bones.

Read a great and fairly detailed article about this at
http: //mag.awn.com/index.php?ltype= pageone&article_no=3605& page=1.

The ongoing (last 2 years) struggle about fighting against this is detailed at
http: //www.illustratorspartnership.org/01_topics/article.php?searchterm=00185.

And, if you are as disturbed by this as I am (and you SHOULD BE), pleasepleasePLEASE look up your elected officials here
http: //www.usa.gov/Contact/Elected.shtml
and let them know how you feel. At least we can say we let our voices be heard on this one.

(Sorry for the spaces in the web addresses, but they weren't posting correctly in links and I wanted to be sure they got out there.)

Please repost this info and these links anywhere and everywhere you feel is appropriate.