Petition Stop Government Approved Copyright Theft

Photographers, illustrators and authors are about to lose their digital copyright under a new proposal published by the government at the beginning of July: the Extended Collective Licensing (ECL) program. Under the ECL, any agency could apply to become a licensing authority for a given class of work - for example, poetry - and then license any work in that class *without the rightsholder's permission*. For any fee it cared to set (so long as it was "significantly representative of rights holders affected by the scheme" whatever that means). This agency would have *no obligation to return revenue gained to the rightsholder*.

The government must put a stop to this scandalous destruction of the most basic presumption under copyright law: that rightsholders have the right to give or withhold permission for their work to be exploited, and to set the rate for this use.