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Orphan works will disappear in the UK
June 9, 2009 | 5:04 pm
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By Paul Biba
Take a look at the last paragraph of my excerpt. It helps to put the Google settlement into perspective. Something needs to be done. You can read the original here.
A report showing how millions of “orphan works” are prevented from being available online due to current copyright laws has become the latest urgent call to the government and policy makers to look again at existing copyright act.
“In from the Cold”, a report by the Strategic Content Alliance (led by JISC) and The Collections Trust, shows that over 50 million items such as photographs, recordings, texts and other ephemera from the last 100 years – risk becoming invisible because such works are currently excluded from any digitisation projects owing to the complexity and time required to trace ownership.
The report was commissioned to find the scale and impact of “orphan works” held in trust by libraries, museums, archives and universities on public service delivery.
… The report highlighted that the UK is in real danger of losing 20th century materials under current copyright laws and the potential lock down of access to these important works.
Over 500 organisations took part in the online survey to establish the impact of orphan works across the museums, archives, libraries and universities. Of the 13 million works represented in the survey, it would take in the region of six million days to trace the rights holders, around 16,000 years.
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Comments:
Orphan Works: copyrights that benefit no one but harm everyone.
Yes, orphan works are a real problem. It’s not so much works that have a definite author – at least then it may be possible to track down the author’s heirs.
But there many items, e.g. photographs, that do not have any author identification on them. But are almost certainly “in copyright” and can’t be freely copied.
Some kind of general licence for works with no identifiable author is really needed.
“Orphan works” is a dishonest term for an even more dishonest agenda. In practice, those who hope to grow rich off using the works of others have no intention of locating, much less paying, copyright holders. There’s no doubt about that. It’s already happening in the music industry. As Jesse Walker notes:
“The Web radio experience is instructive. The institution that distributes performance fees to artists is SoundExchange, an organization that spun off from the Recording Industry Association of America in 2003. In 2007, the Houston Press noted that the group was apparently unable to locate about 25 percent of the performers on whose behalf it was allegedly acting. After perusing the list of lost musicians, the Press’s John Nova Lomax reported that ‘in less than five minutes of Googling, I found the official Web sites and/or MySpace pages of Fito Olivares, Goudie, Mark May, the Hollisters and Los Skarnales. What’s more, highly visible people like Cam’ron (fresh off a highly-publicized appearance on 60 Minutes), Fat Joe and Danzig are on the ‘lost’ list too.’”
Source: http://www.reason.com/news/show/134011.html
Don’t be fools. This debate isn’t about “orphan works.” It’s about exploiting the works of people who’re very much alive and very capable of being found. As the RIAA/SoundExchange has already gone, so Google’s book registry will go. It’s a scam.
I have figures to back that up from no less a source than Michael Boni, the lawyer allegedly representing the “author sub-class” in the Google settlement. According to an email he sent that was passed on to me, less than 4 percent of the authors whose books Google initially scanned have come forward. If this settlement is approved by a court, look for Google to put its scanners into overdrive, its publicity machine into hibernation, and the number of found “orphan works” authors to shrink to less than 1 percent. For Google, the money lies in keeping orphaned works orphaned.
I might add that I know authors are findable. I managed to find the author of a book published in the UK by an anonymous author who lived in Nazi Germany despite the fact that today the book’s original publisher didn’t have a clue as to who the author was. (Making that book no only an orphan work, but one by a nameless orphan.) I did it by rolling up my sleeves and working. Those who want to publish orphan works can do the same.
Interesting to read this. I don’t agree that this is about exploiting anyone, as far as I understand (and I have attended several lectures by the authors of the report recently).
I work in an archives and we are digitising a collection of 17th century papers, which are technically still in copyright until 2039 and are therefore. There are 30,000 documents, a large proportion of which have authors that are unknown and the majority of the rest have copyright owners that are definitely untracable (and so are ‘orphan works’). A single letter of this age may technically have thousands of copyright owners and it would be impossible to trace the descendants of each author to establish who is the heir of the person that wrote it.
Although we are only taking a slight risk in publishing these papers (and thereby making the historical information available to researchers all over the world), I would be much happier if it were risk free. I think there needs to be a distinction drawn between Google putting illegal copies of books on-line and libraries, archives and museums who wish to make their historical collections available without taking unecessary risks.