The Collections Trust and the Strategic Content Alliance have announced a joint initiative to assess the impact of 'orphan works' on the delivery of services to the public. Orphan works are works for which the copyright owner is unknown or cannot be traced.
As part of the initiative, an online survey has been set up to allow cultural heritage, education, health and public service broadcast organisations to register how the issue affects their own service provision. The first research of its kind into the extent of orphan works across the UK and Europe, the survey has already received hundreds of responses from collections across the United Kingdom and overseas.
The survey is now available online and the closing date for completion is January 16, 2009. The survey is the first stage in a wider project to tackle the issue of orphan works. Further work will be undertaken in the coming months. This includes the publication of case studies providing detailed examples of the impact of orphan works on the provision of access to public sector content. A one-day conference to explore the issues and propose a way forward is also planned.
'Orphan works' is one of the main issues that has received much attention in recent years. Stakeholders around the world have been debating whether orphan works should be dealt with as a matter of a copyright exception, a reduction in copyright penalties once a "parent" is located, or a blanket collective licence. In March 2008, the publishing industry urged the US Congress to take legislative action to address the problem of 'orphan works'. Allan Adler, AAP Vice President for Legal & Government Affairs, testified on behalf of the Association of American Publishers (AAP). He told the House Judiciary Committee's Subcommittee on Courts, the Internet and Intellectual Property that book publishers, as both users and producers of copyrighted works, have an important stake in achieving an equitable and workable statutory solution.
