IT and Copyright: UK releases a report “Digital Opportunity”

The UK has recently released a long-awaited independent report “Digital opportunity” on issues of intellectual property, written by Professor Ian Hargreaves commissioned by the British Prime Minister David Cameron.

The report includes recommendations on how the country's intellectual property system can be changed to increase growth and innovation. Great Britain however is not going to adopt the US law “on fair use” which enables a limited use of copyrighted materials without the permission of right holders.

The report also touches upon a disputable issue on “orphan works”.

An orphan work could be a book, film, photograph, television programme or a piece of music or fine art where the person who owns the copyright cannot be identified or traced.

A couple of years ago a report put a conservative estimate on the number of orphan works held in British public institutions such as the British Library, BBC, BFI and Tate at 25 million.

The report, written by Professor Ian Hargreaves, suggests that the government should legislate to enable these orphan works to be unlocked and allowed into the public domain through the creation of a licensing system.

The proposal is to establish a central not-for-profit body that would issue an indemnifying license to those who hold orphan works once they have proved that they had made reasonable enquiries to find the copyright owner.

The whole business of orphan works has been brought into focus by the internet. Institutions and publishers wanted to make their archives available to the public via the web - for educational and commercial reasons - and found they couldn't. They were unable to digitise without the copyright holders approval.

So for example, there are thousands of photographs of British servicemen during the World War I and World War II held by the British Library. These photographs have a value to researchers and quite possibly to the general public, but there is no way of tracing the rights owner — which in turn means the photographs cannot be digitised and made accessible.

There is another problem created by not being able to digitise orphan works: many are deteriorating (film, photographs) and need to be digitised for preservation purposes.