Have I missed this thread?

If not, what the?! How did this get so far without any massive campaigning not being done?

http://www.copyrightaction.com/forum/uk-gov-nationalises-orphans-and-bans-non-consensual-photography-in-public#comment-401

In short:

The end game is now in sight. The Digital Economy Bill is now expected to become law within the next 6 weeks. It introduces orphan works usage rights, which – unless amended, which HMG says it will not – will allow the commercial use of any photograph whose author cannot be identified through a suitably negligent search. That is potentially about 90% of the photos on the internet.

Copyright in photos is essentially going to cease to exist, since there is no ineradicable way of associating ownership details short of plastering your name right across the image.

Seb Rogers blogged it last week as well: http://sebrogers.typepad.com/seb_rogers_blog/2010/02/photographers-may-lose-rights-in-uk-digital-economy-bill.html

Is this not a big issue and I'm reading this all wrongly, or has no one else noticed it?

Does it open the doors to copyright infringement, or try to shut them. At the moment people publish their photos on the internet in a form that makes them ripe for theft and reproduction – if you post a picture, either for business or pleasure, I can take it, host it, reproduce it and claim it as yours, mine, anybodies whether for profit or fun, whether you sanction it or not. And its still as fresh as the image you posted, its not like photocopies and tape to tape, theres no degradation as part of the piracy.

Theres no framework to protect images on the internet, so people post their images…. and thats it. If its good (or cute, or stupid) and people get excited about it it'll get re-hosted and re-posted so many times you might not be able to trace the owner or know the terms it was published under no matter how hard you try. Thats crap for some people, but the internet would practically stop if it didn't happen.

If you create legislation that requires to the copyright owner to be responsible for making their work identifiable and traceable if they want to retain copyright then at least theres a rule and you can choose whether to play or not. Either don't put your pictures out there, or except that if you do you are making them available copyright-free, or identify your work. I'm sure there are ways of making your work identifiably yours, digitally, without that identification being visible, for instance if I post a picture I've taken, if you know how to look then you could find all the other pictures taken with my camera that are on the internet. So why not make deliberate use of that digital fingerprint?