Orphan Works -bill. A new law about copyright in the United States?

There is a lot of talk over the internet about a new bill being proposed in the United States, and how it will affect artists, especially those who post their work on the internet. This bill would make copyright less strict on works where you can not find the creator of the work. It is intended to support and encourage people to create new work based on these "orphaned" cultural assets without the fear of the original owner resurfacing and claiming damages. Yet the fear is that the law will leave a loophole that would allow people to exploit works of art by the non-established artists, whose main showcase for their work is on the internet. Also, there is concern over the proposition of having to actually register all individual pieces of work with a copyright registry (which costs money) to make sure that piece of work is protected. This, again, would be difficult for non-established artists to manage in the long run.

Most people come to contact with the idea or "Orphan Works" through a particularly panic-mongering article written by Mark Simon that is being passed on and posted a lot in different places online. This article is written in a very populistic and emotional way (it begins with "this bill pisses me off" or something to that effect), and the author hardly considers all, if any, of the facts involved (and then there are some downright non-truths in the text as well). Understandably, this kind of matter makes people uneasy in online art communities.


Here is a link to the original bill from 2006.
http://www.publicknowledge.org/pdf/ow-act-2006.pdf
In Orphaned Works Bill you can find the 2008 bill.
An explanation what orphaned works even are on the same site:
http://www.publicknowledge.org/issues/ow

Here is a link to a good posting by an admin in a Y! yaoi-gallery (the gallery may be a little risque, but the post is very helpful) explaining the inaccuracies in the article and discussing the bill a little.
http://yaoi.y-gallery.net/journal/snover/130570/

There's this news item in deviantArt:
http://news.deviantart.com/article/46491/
And this in the journal of one of the dA admins:
http://realitysquared.deviantart.com/journal/17811892/
http://realitysquared.deviantart.com/journal/18227968/
http://realitysquared.deviantart.com/journal/18240977/#journal

This:
http://www.copyright.gov/docs/regstat031308.html