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Draft Letter to Senators

You may copy and paste this text, print it on your letterhead, and fax or mail it to both of your U.S. Senators. Please feel free to change the wording as you wish.

Finding Your Senators' Info

A convenient source for fax numbers and email addresses is www.visi.com/juan/congress. After you select your state, your Senators will be the first two names on the list.

The U.S. Senate's own directory of contact information for Senators is listed here. It has emails, but to get the other info you have to click on the Senator's name and follow the links.

Fax from your Mac

Mac OS X has built-in features for sending faxes. To use it, first plug an analog (voice) telephone line into the Mac's modem port. Then you simply "print" the fax. In the 10.3 (Panther) version of the OS, the print dialog has a Fax… button. In 10.4 (Tiger), it's one of the options under the PDF… button.

Re: S.2913 the Shawn Bentley Orphan Works Act of 2008

Dear Senator ________________________________:

I am one of your constituents, a professional photographer, and a member of the American Society of Media Photographers (ASMP). It is crucial to my professional livelihood that you oppose this bill in its current form. If this bill's current language becomes law, it would permit, and even encourage, wide-scale infringements of my copyrighted photographs while depriving me of many of the protections currently available to me under the Copyright Act, including the right to ask the courts to award statutory damages and attorneys' fees. In the publication world, the reality is that most photographs will easily become considered orphaned, depriving me of a significant part of my much needed income.

I urge you to oppose this bill unless and until it is amended to contain at least the minimum provisions that are critical to protect photographers, including but not limited to a notice of use that must be filed before the use is made, upon penalty of losing eligibility to claim orphan work status for failure to file the notice; an archive of the notices, to be maintained by the Copyright Office or an approved third party; and other protections that appear in the current (May 15, 2008) language of H.R. 5889.

Please let me know if you have any questions or if I can provide you with any additional information. Thank you for your time. I hope that you will take the necessary actions to protect my interests and prevent the passage of this bill until it is amended to be fair and reasonable to all parties.

Respectfully yours,
(your name)