The latest news from Mike Finley

There has been a lot of discussion recently on various forums about a US 'orphan works' bill, and the impact it will have on photographers and artists whose work is visible on the internet. One site that's trying to bring the links together and summarise is Copyright Action

In essence this bill will allow anyone who cannot determine the owner of the copyright of an image found on the internet (or elsewhere) to use it without penalty, and also sets up commercial registries that artists in the US are expected to register their copyright works with (at a price). If this passes in the US, similar legislation is likely to follow in other countries, despite the fact that it flies in the face of the Berne convention on international copyright that most countries are signatories to.

One thing artists should consider doing is adding copyright metadata to the jpeg images they upload onto the internet, and to check how to upload in such a way that the hosting site does not remove the metadata.

We have added a news feed to the Rogue Gene Collective to enable you to be informed of new artworks added to the site. The feed conforms to the RSS 2.0 (Really Simple Syndication) standard supported by most (probably all) current readers.

The latest versions of most web browsers support auto-discovery of news feeds and may provide direct support for using news feeds - see you browser documentation for details. The Rogue Gene Collective website advertises the feed for autodiscovery on the home page of the site, and also on the recent art page.

The recent art page also has a link to trigger any explicit subscription support in your browser, and a link to add the feed to the Google Reader or your Google home page. If you need to type the feed address directly into your newsreader for some reason, the full address is recent_art_feed.html

latest: We have added an additional feed to enable you to keep informed of our developing programme of events. You can subscribe to this feed either from the home page (if your browser supports auto-discovery of feeds) or from the Full Events List page.

We hope you find this new service useful. Further news feeds may be added in future.

Mike Finley is delighted to report that he has been appointed the Resident Photographer at the Lower Moss Wood wildlife hospital in Cheshire. Mike has been a volunteer at Lower Moss Wood for some time, building and running the organisation's website, and is also a member of the 'Friends of Lower Moss Wood' support group.

One result of this appointment will be the availability of a range of photographic prints related to the work of Lower Moss Wood with a large percentage of the price going to the Lower Moss Wood funds. More details will be added when this is properly set up.