This section contains information relating to our associations' professional annual meetings. These meetings are vital not only for the financial health of our organizations, but they also represent great opportunities for all of us to gain new skills, to share academic or research interests, and to acquire continuing education hours for certification.

We continue to expand this section to include recent manufacturer press releases and other noteworthy items of information for our JBC subscribers and Association members. Please let us know how we may improve this section, as well as other components of your Journal.

Upcoming 2009 Meetings

San Francisco, California
at the Moscone Center

January 5 - 9, 2009

Macworld is the premier event for the Mac community, bringing together industry leaders shaping the future of Mac technology in the largest single gathering of Mac developers, engineers, and enthusiasts in the world.

The Macworld conference consists of seven programs featuring educational sessions taught by renowned industry experts, covering a wide array of themes that span the Mac industry’s trends and developments. From technical to hands-on to simply wanting to understand a particular functionality the Mac platform has to offer, the Macworld conference offers a full mix of content to appeal to enthusiasts at all levels.

The 2009 Macworld Conference Program includes:

Users Conference – Skill Development across Mac-enables solutions.

Mac IT Conference – In Depth topics for IT Professionals

Power Tools – 2 day in-depth training on popular Mac software applications.

Market Symposiums – analysis and deployment of Mac technology in key markets.

Hands-on MacLabs - Hands-on, focused training classes.

Creative Safaris – Daylong hands-on and fieldwork with key Mac tools.

Super sessions – Quick hits to get you up to speed on key Mac technology.

The magnificent Moscone Center is centrally located in the heart of downtown's bustling SoMa (South of Market) district, the newly renovated San Francisco Marriott is merely steps from cable cars, Union Square, museums, world-class shopping, dining, and entertainment. The San Francisco Marriott has recently completed a $39 million room and suite renovation that features contemporary furnishings and a comfortable "urban apartment" feel. All rooms are furnished with Marriott's new luxurious Revive Bed. The gracious staff and deluxe hotel amenities of the San Francisco Marriott stand ready to make your visit elegant, relaxing and memorable.

For additional information, visit: http://www.macworldexpo.com/live/20/

International Conference on eHealth,
Telemedicine and Social Medicine

eTELEMED 2009
Cancun, Mexico

February 1 - 6, 2009

The International Conference on eHealth, Telemedicine, and Social Medicine (eTELEMED 2009) will offer registrants opportunities to learn about topics relevant to the field.

Included in the Conference will be presentations relating to:

eHealth technology and devices
eHealth data records
eHealth information processing
eHealth systems and communications
Hospital information systems
Internet/intranet services
Surgical systems
Sensor-based systems
Satellite eHealth communications
Secure data transmissions
Body-sensor networks
Telemedicine/eHealth applications
eHealth systems and emergency situations
Challenges of large-scale, cost-effective eHealth systems

Please visit: http://www.iaria.org/conferences2009/CfPeTELEMED09.html

PMA 2009:
The Worldwide Community of Imaging Association
International Convention and Trade Show

Las Vegas Convention Center in Las Vegas, Nevada
March 3 - 5, 2009

PMA 09 kicks off an exciting week of innovative products and ideas for the photographic memories market.

As a professional trade association, PMA helps the worldwide photo imaging community achieve business success and adapt to new technologies. Its commitment to 20,000 members in 100-plus countries is part of an 82-year legacy that connects business owners to a network of knowledge and support. PMA furthers this purpose through the development of educational programs and business services, marketing research, publications, and trade shows. As a nonprofit organization, any success enjoyed by PMA in its endeavors directly benefits the industry, allowing PMA to provide continual services and activities for members. Our annual meetings showcase our educational programs, as well as provide a look at related imaging products.

For additional information, please visit: http://www.pmai.org/index.cfm/ci_id/37703/la_id/1.htm

WCNC 2009
Sponsored by the IEEE Communications Society

Budapest Hungary
Conference: April 5 - 8, 2009

IEEE WCNC is the premier wireless event for wireless communications researchers, industry professionals, and academics interested in the latest development and design of wireless systems and networks. Sponsored by the IEEE Communications Society, IEEE WCNC has a long history of bringing together industry, academia, and regulatory bodies. In 2009, IEEE WCNC will be held in Budapest, Hungary, the pearl of the Danube.

For more information, please visit: www.ieee-wcnc.org/2009

INFOCOM 2009

The 28th Conference on Computer Communications
Sponsored by the IEEE Communications Society

Rio de Janeiro, Brazil
April 19 - 25, 2009

The IEEE annual Conference on Computer Communications addresses key topics and issues related to computer communications, with emphasis on traffic management and protocols for both wired and wireless networks. Material is presented a program of technical sessions, tutorials, panel discussions and workshops. The first INFOCOM conference took place in 1982 and has since taken place at many locations around the world - Italy, Japan, Israel, Spain (and now Brazil!), as well as most regions of the U.S.

http://www.ieee-infocom.org/

Association of Biomedical
Communications Directors (ABCD)

Annual Meeting and Retreat

St. Louis, Missouri
June 17 - 20, 2009

The Health and Science Communications Association and the Association of Biomedical Communications Directors invite you to attend and participate in the 50th International Conference on Health & Science Communications. The conference will be held June 17-20, 2009 in the "Show Me" state of Missouri, the home of the Gateway Arch. This year's theme is The Creative Arch - Where imagination meets technology. This meeting is also historic in that it commemorates 50 years of excellence in the field of communication serving both the health and science arena.

The 2009 Conference will showcase some of the finest, most interesting applications of technology in communications. The conference will feature creative applications for these technologies, and offer problem-solving solutions to communications challenges.

Topics to be explored include: website usability, social networking, design flexibility, distance learning, creativity, managing in financially stressful times, and much, much more.

So mark June 17 - 20, 2009 in your calendar and join us in St. Louis to learn, network, tour, create, question, discover, relate, understand, and much more with colleagues from around the world. For more information, please visit the conference website: http://www.hesca.org/stlouis/

The Genetic and Evolutionary
Computation Conference

Delta Centre-Ville Hotel
Montreal, Canada

July 8 - 12, 2009

The Genetic and Evolutionary Computation Conference (GECCO-2009) will be located in Montreal, Canada for 2009. This Conference will present the latest results in the growing field of genetic and evolutionary computation.

Conference topics will include: genetic algorithms, genetic programming, evolution strategies, evolutionary programming, real-world applications, learning classifier systems and other genetics-based machine learning, evolvable hardware, artificial life, adaptive behavior, ant colony optimization, swarm intelligence, biological applications, robotics, co-evolution, artificial immune systems, and more.

About the Conference Venue
Delta Centre-Ville hotel is located in the heart of downtown, where Old Montreal and new Montreal blend seamlessly, and adjacent to vibrant nightlife, boutique shops and eclectic cuisine.

For more information on Delta Centre-Ville, please visit: http://www.deltahotels.com

BioCommunications Association (BCA)
79th Annual Meeting - BIOCOMM 2009

Park City, Utah
July 26 - 30, 2009

Held annually in North America, this international meeting includes a packed program of seminars, workshops, a juried media salon, and commercial exhibits to provide attendees with inspiration and the latest information on visual media in the life sciences.

Our meeting highlights will include an Opening Reception featuring the BioImages Salon Awards, a three-day Scientific Program, and an evening Social Event. More BIOCOMM 2009 information will be posted as it becomes available.
http://www.bca.org/annual_meeting/index.html

For information about Park City, Utah, please visit: http://www.parkcityinfo.com/

Our hotel venue for this event will be the beautiful Marriott Park City. For additional hotel information please visit: http://www.parkcitymarriott.com

Contact: Thomas Bednarek, RBP
BCA Director of Conferences
Phone: 409-772-2876
email: tbednare@utmb.edu

Association of Medical Illustrators (AMI)
64th Annual Conference

Richmond, Virginia
July 29 - August 2, 2009

Richmond, Virginia! A city with a rich and vibrant history, home to events from the earliest days of our nation’s history through today, including the first elected African-American governor in the U.S.

The City of Monuments abounds with activities and interesting places to visit, learn and enjoy. From the beautiful St. John’s Church on Church Hill, the location of Patrick Henry’s call to arms in 1775, to the sleek new convention center downtown. From Colonial Williamsburg to Mr. Jefferson’s University, both are within an hour’s drive. Richmond is easy to reach and easy to love. Cultural venues abound, with the American Civil War Center, the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts with the largest Faberge collection outside of Russia.

The AMI meeting will take a hint from the city itself - and look at topics embracing our history and traditions through to the cutting edge of computer technology and medicine and their interface in medical communications. The Richmond 2009 meeting committee looks forward to seeing you next year in Richmond!

More information will be made available soon at: http://www.ami.org

Stimulate. Collaborate. Create.

SIGGRAPH 2009

Ernest N. Morial Convention Center
New Orleans, Louisiana

August 3 - 7, 2009

Please join us in New Orleans in August for the highest quality, most timely educational experiences the computer graphics community has to offer, presented by the most powerful and most engaging leaders in computer graphics and interactive techniques.

Don’t miss this one!

http://www.siggraph.org/s2009

Related Association News

SBA Roundtable Web Cast Link
by Illustrators' Partnership of America

The web cast of the Orphan Works Roundtable is now available at:
http://videos.cmitnyc.com/asip.html

Orphan Works legislation currently before the U.S. Congress will drastically change the way biocommunicators and others market and manage their copyrighted images. Under this proposed legislation, images that have been determined that to be “orphaned” can be then be used by anyone, at anytime will little or no repercussion. The Orphan Works Roundtable was held recently to openly discuss this legislation, and the negative effect it would have on the illustration community if it should pass.

The Orphan Works Roundtable has been described as:
"A Seminal Event"
"Unprecedented"
"The most effective advocacy in opposition to these bills I have seen."
"The Gathering of the Tribes"

These were some of the comments we received from the recent Roundtable Discussion on Orphan Works (held August 8, 2008), conducted by the Small Business Administration. Artists, photographers, songwriters, musicians, writers and spokesmen for collateral businesses all made this the best attended Roundtable the SBA has ever conducted.

As one member of the audience said, perhaps the only good thing about the Orphan Works bill is that it's brought so many creative communities together. The full house is the best measure of the concern creators have about this effort to undermine copyright law.

Here are some of the key points to emerge from the discussion:

• The high cost of digitizing and registering work with commercial databases will make compliance impossible for most artists.
• This will cause billions of unregistered works to fall into the public domain.
• To make money, commercial databases will have to promote and facilitate infringement.
• Infringer-friendly databases will compete with artists for clients.

As one panelist summed up: this bill "will socialize costs and privatize profits."

If you missed this important industry event, please watch it now at your convenience. You may review the agenda, the panelists and their biographies on the Illustrators' Partnership blog located at:

http://ipaorphanworks.blogspot.com/2008/08/80808-sba-hearing-on-orphan-works.html

The Illustrators' Partnership of America

The Association of Medical Illustrators, in conjunction with The Society of Illustrators, The National Cartoonists Society, The American Society of Architectural Illustrators, and The Illustrators' Partnership of America, continues to seek better ways to market and license the rights to their creative work.

One of the goals of this working coalition is still to explore the possibility of collecting and pooling artists' reprographic fees in order to create a collective rights administration to return reproduction royalties to illustrators. Since the birth of the Illustrators' Partnership of America, the organization's key mission has been the development of a licensing agency that would truly represent the best interests of American artists and illustrators.

For more information about the Illustrators' Partnership of America, visit the IPA Website at http://www.illustratorspartnership.org/

For information about protecting your copyrights:

http://www.copyright.com/
http://www.ifrro.org/
http://www.copyright.gov/
http://www.copyright.gov/circs/circ1.html

Proposed Legislation Could Orphan Copyrights

On January 23, 2006 the U.S. Copyright Office issued their Orphan Works Report, outlining their recommendations to Congress for changes to the 1976 Copyright Act. While we know the Copyright Office made a sincere effort to solve the problem of copyright availability for users, we believe these proposed changes will undermine copyright protections for artists.

The report defines an "orphan work" as any work where the author is unidentifiable or unlocatable, regardless of the age of the work. It extends to both published and unpublished works, and includes both U.S. and foreign works. At 127 pages, the report is too long to analyze in detail here, but you can access it at the Copyright Office website. For those who wish to cut to the chase, the explicit language for their proposed changes can be found on page 127.

"For authors and copyright owners, marking copies of their works with identifying information is likely the most significant step they can take to avoid the work falling into the orphan works category. This is particularly true for works of visual art, like photographs and illustrations, that otherwise do not contain text or other information that a user can rely on to help determine the identity of the copyright owner. Nothing in the Office's recommendation would make such markings mandatory . . . Nevertheless, the presence and quality of the information on particular copies will be a highly relevant fact as to whether a reasonable search will find the copyright owner."  (p. 9, emphasis added)  

In other words, the "information" that has been placed on your work will be a "highly relevant fact" in determining - for legal purposes - whether a user has made a "reasonable search" to find you before he or she uses your work. But since the report doesn't set objective standards for what constitutes a "reasonable search," it paves the way for endless ambiguity. What do you do if a user infringes your work after what he regards as a reasonable effort to find you? What if someone simply uses your work on the grounds that you may not find out about it, and if you do, justifies his actions by citing the "fact" that your work lacked "relevant information?"
   
No Penalties For Infringing Orphan Work
Those who have demanded this legislation have argued that users should not be subject to penalties for infringing orphan work. They say that the public should be encouraged to use this work and that penalties would discourage use. The Copyright Office has agreed:  

"Our recommendation follows this suggestion by limiting the possible monetary relief in these cases to only 'reasonable compensation' which is intended to represent the amount the user would have paid to the owner had they engaged in negotiations before the infringing use commenced." (p. 12)

In other words, if someone infringes your work because they couldn't find you - and you come forward to claim authorship - this system would only require the infringer to pay you the fee they presume you would have "negotiated." Yet if someone has already published your work - and faces no risk for statutory damages, attorneys‚ fees and court costs, they'll be in a better position than you to dictate what constitutes a "reasonable" fee. And unless you can work with the fee they offer, you'll have no choice but to take the issue to court, knowing that the cost of litigation could well exceed whatever "reasonable compensation" the courts might determine.
   
By considering and rejecting remedies for infringement, the Copyright Office acknowledged the complaints by creators‚ groups that individual authors generally lack the resources to police unauthorized usage:

"While corporate copyright owners were generally in favor of a reasonable compensation approach, individual authors like photographers, illustrators and graphic artists noted that under current conditions, obtaining a lawyer to even file an infringement case is prohibitively expensive, so much so that only where statutory damages are available is it possible to file a case. If compensation were limited to only a reasonable royalty, they fear that it will likewise be practically impossible even to recover that compensation given the cost of litigation." ( p. 117)

But while the Report expresses "sympathy" for this fact of life, it states that "[t]his problem . . . has existed for some time and goes beyond the orphan works situation, extending to all types of infringement of the works of individual authors . . . It is not, however, within the province of this study on orphan works." (p.114, emphasis added)
   
Yet if the problem is not within the province of the Orphan Works Study, we must introduce it into the coming debate over legislation. Otherwise, a law that exposes vast quantities of copyrighted work to potential abuse could make the existing bad situation worse, making payment for usage the option of last resort for any user who chooses to exploit this glaring loophole.
 
Are Registries a Solution?
The Orphan Works Report notes that many respondents to the Study proposed "registries or other databases of owner or user information" as a possible solution of tracking rights holders.  A publicly available visual artists registry would match unidentified art to an artist and/or the artist's contact information. But creating a registry requires technology and staff unavailable to independent artists. Other countries protect their artists' exclusive rights through the administration of collecting societies. The Orphan Works Report states that "such administrative mechanisms might ultimately be of great assistance in helping put owners and users of orphan works together" (p. 95), but says the Copyright Office lacks the resources to create and administer them:

"[W]e believe that registries are critically important, if not indispensable, to addressing the orphan works problem, as we explain above. It is our view that such registries are better developed in the private sector, and organically become part of the reasonable search by users by creating incentives for authors and owners to ensure that their information is included in the relevant databases."  (p.106, emphasis added)

But if Congress can’t allocate funds to create the kind of registry that Orphan Works legislation would make "indispensable," Congress should not impose that burden on rights holders as a condition of maintaining their copyrights.  Especially since the effect of these changes would be retroactive, that is, affecting work created over the last 28 years, during which time artists did work with the expectation that it would be protected - whether marked and registered or not, for their lifetime plus 50 (now 70) years.
   
Specific Exemptions as a Solution
We believe most artists would agree with the Copyright Office that an orphan works problem exists.  Any of us who have ever wanted to duplicate old family photos will understand how troublesome (even futile) it can be to try tracking down a long-lost photographer or other potential rights-holder. But if Congress concludes that legislation is necessary to solve problems like this, we urge them to craft specific, limited exemptions instead of sweeping legislation that shifts the burden of diligence from users to copyright holders.

A limited exemption could be crafted to solve family photo restoration and reproduction issues without otherwise gutting photographers' copyrights. Usage for genealogy research is probably already covered by fair use, but could be specifically exempted if necessary. Limited exemptions could be designed for documentary filmmakers as well. Libraries and archives already have generous exemptions for their not-for-profit missions, but if their missions are changing to include for-profit ventures, they should abide by commercial standards for the usage of copyrighted material.
   
The Next Step
In conducting this study, the Copyright Office identified as the primary goal of Orphan Works legislation: "to make it more likely that a user can find the relevant owner in the first instance, and negotiate a voluntary agreement over permission and payment, if appropriate, for the intended use of the work." (p. 8) Yet we're afraid that this system as proposed will do little to "bring users and authors together." In fact, it could well force authors into the "marketplace" of the courts to attempt recovery of compensation after their work has been used and their copyrights compromised.

Last spring nearly 2,000 individual artists and 42 organizations joined us in opposing Orphan Works legislation. We thank all of you for your responses to our submission to the Study. Since then, we've had several opportunities to express our opposition directly to the Copyright Office. We participated in the government‚s two-day Orphan Works roundtables last July 26 and 27, and at their invitation, we met individually with Copyright Office attorneys on November 17. Now we'll need to rally again to see that the proposals in this study are not enacted into law. This will require a practical strategy and a concerted effort. We'll keep you informed as this develops, and we'll let you know how you can help.

Brad Holland and Cynthia Turner
for the Board of the Illustrators' Partnership of America

http://www.illustratorspartnership.org/

The Vesalius Trust

About The Vesalius Trust

History of the Trust
Since its founding in 1988, the Trust has endeavored to identify and secure funding for educational and research activities in visual communications in the health sciences, and to act as a conduit for these resources. Currently, the Trust supports: scholarships, research grants, continuing professional education, and an international recognition program for exceptional contributions to medical education.

The Frank H. Netter, M.D. Award and Vesalius Trust Awards of Excellence recognize and honor significant contributions to the field of health science communications.

Mission of the Trust
To provide leadership for the advancement of education and research in visual communications for the health sciences.

Vision Statement
To be known as the premier resource for funding of visual communications in the health sciences.

Our Commitment
Our commitment to support visual communications in the health sciences is broad. During the past year, the Trust has endeavored to form alliances with related groups and associations within the field of biocommunication. The Trust not only supports scholarship and research in the profession of medical illustration, but also includes and supports the areas of biomedical and scientific photography, biomedical visualization, anatomical animation, life science and zoological illustration, microbiological and molecular visualization, video production, and biomedical research.

Contributions
We welcome financial contributions of any size from individuals or corporations interested in the Trust's mission. Those individuals interested in making a tax deductible contribution to the Vesalius Trust are encouraged to visit the Trust's website below.

E-mail inquiries regarding the Vesalius Trust are also encouraged at: Vesaliustrust@aol.com

Please visit The Vesalius Trust's web site for additional information:
http://www.vesaliustrust.org