Okay, stop shitting yourselves over this.

The pants shitting article in question

If the link is broken, just keep refreshing

This article is some fanatical bullshit (you can tell that by the second line in the entire thing)

Here are some less fanatical views on it:
Publicknowledge.org's article
Copyright.gov's article

This has been around since 2005 (three years if you can't count) and has been rejected twice.

It's directed towards the works of people that are dead or missing, and if they DO use their work, they are required to give credit to the original artist (as much info that can be found) even if they CANNOT be contacted.

While I can't say I'm a fan of the idea, it certainly is not unreasonable, as some people here are making it out to be.

You are not gonna lose all of your artwork, no one is gonna steal your shitty Sonic fancharacter and sell it for profit, don't even THINK you're good enough to have this applied to you.

And of course theres a fucking internet petition about it. Out of the hundreds of stupid internet petitions I've seen, the only thing I've seen come from one is the change of Buzz Bunny to Ace Bunny in the cartoon Loonatics, but who gives a shit about that cartoon anyways?

You can sign the petition, sure, but if I were part of legislation, I wouldn't want to read through the petition of a bunch of misguided 15 year olds with unwarranted self importance and poor grammar.

So, chill out dudes. The government isn't gonna steal your precious special snowflake character, that's MySpace's job.