Articles
CASE Act Making Moves in the House
Your voice is being heard. People like you, fighting for artists’ rights, have sent letters to Congress over the past few months to champion H.R. 3945, the “Copyright Alternative in Small-Claims Enforcement Act (“the CASE Act ”). CASE addresses a decades-old inequity in America's copyright system: a copyright system that all too often denies individual creators and small businesses a viable means of protecting their creative efforts. When it passes, the bill will give smaller individual creators the same kind of protections that larger scale creators have enjoyed for years.
PPA commends Representatives Jeffries, Marino, Collins, Smith, Chu, Cicilline, Lieu, Cohen, and Cramer for their dedication to supporting the creative community—including their members, most of whom are small business owners—and for their keen appreciation of the plight faced by creative professionals who are all too often left with rights but no remedies under current copyright law.
Copyright infringement takes a direct economic toll on these often-one-person operations, who must shoulder the burden of policing infringements while at the same time seeking and fulfilling assignments, working on self-initiated projects and maintaining all the tasks of running a 24/7 business. For many, losses due to infringement are overwhelming.
The coalition of visual arts associations supporting H.R. 3945 includes the American Photographic Artists (APA), American Society of Media Photographers (ASMP), Digital Media Licensing Association (DMLA), Graphic Artists Guild (GAG), National Press Photographers Association (NPPA), North American Nature Photography Association (NANPA) and Professional Photographers of America (PPA).
Things are moving fast in D.C.! Don’t stop fighting! Demand your representatives co-sponsor or vote for H.R. 3945, which provides long overdue, much-needed and meaningful legislative relief for the photographers and artists currently squeezed out of the legal system by the high cost of bringing suit in federal court for higher volume but relatively low-value claims, have seen their licensing revenues decimated in recent years by the proliferation of copyright infringements, particularly in the online context. Enactment of the CASE Act will provide an effective, affordable alternative to prosecuting copyright infringement claims in federal court—an option that is all too often not economically affordable for individual small creators.
Let’s get it done! Keep sending your letters now.