The House Intellectual Property Subcommittee held a meeting on H.R. 5889 on Wednesday. If you don't recognize the title you may know it as The Orphan Works Act of 2008.

If you don't quite know what I'm talking about you can go to The Journal I Wrote Yesterday. If you manage to read through the entire thing then you deserve some sort of merit badge or something.

Today I tracked down the Video Webcast (Realplayer) of the hearing and sat through the entire 47 minutes and 35 seconds to get a good idea of where the lawmakers stand on the issue, because quite frankly the opposition to this bill is painting them as a bunch of hideous demons who want to legalize art theft.

Personally I never rely on what I'm told when I can go and see it for myself; you get a cleaner copy of the data that way.

I have to say that after watching the hearing I'm even less concerned than I was previously, and I wasn't all that concerned in the first place.

If you actually watch the webcast, at around the four minute mark the chairman actually states that their primary concern is protecting the "smaller, less organized copyright owners" and then goes on to describe you, me, and just about every other member of this community.

The entire hearing almost entirely revolves around how to adequately protect all of us, how to ensure that owners are fairly compensated for use and how to ensure that the search criteria is diligent enough that someone cannot get away with misusing it.

I'm tempted to try to paraphrase the hearing here, but honestly I think the best thing I can do is to tell you that if you are still greatly concerned about the bill you should watch the video.

I can speak more in detail about it a little bit later if there's enough demand for it but for now I have too many restraints on my time today.