The American Society of Picture Professionals has released guidelines entitled “ASPP’s Best Practices for Locating Copyright Owners of Photographic and Visual Art”.
The guide can be found at the ASPP website at: http://www.aspp.com/users/ASPPSite4390/ASPP_Best_Practises_v2_7-8-08.pdf
This guide is intended to be a “living document” and will be continually updated as new registries and technologies become available. This version 2.0 contains many useful links to organizations and other places where one can access information.
Executive Director, Cathy Sachs, expressed the following thoughts: “Especially in light of the Orphan Works pending legislation, it was our hope that these guidelines would be helpful in locating copyright holders, and that they might eventually aid in the construction of the defined "diligent search". This in turn, we hoped, would minimize the flood of "orphans" that might be created by inadequate search procedures. We feel that none of our members would benefit from that.”
Posted by Will Carleton