Academy slams orphan copyright proposal

IPO proposal on orphan works comes under fire

The British Academy has attacked a proposal by the UK Intellectual Property Office (IPO) to make the Copyright Tribunal responsible for granting licences for the use of orphan works.

Orphan works are those where the rights holders cannot be traced, or the date of the author’s death is unknown.

The British Library estimates that 40% of all print works are orphan works.

John Kay, chairman of the British Academy’s copyright committee, said: “That essentially leaves people who want to use that material vulnerable. They can waste a lot of time tracking down someone who owns the copyright. Worse, they can find publishers simply unwilling to let things go in published material without a copyright permission they can’t obtain.”

The IPO, which has issued a report on the work of the Copyright Tribunal, has proposed that, where copyright holders cannot be identified, those wishing to use their work should apply for a licence to the Copyright Tribunal, an independent body set up under the Copyright Act 1988.

“It might not work too badly if the granting of such licences was automatic but otherwise it’s a bureaucratic nightmare,” said Kay.

He said that the IPO proposal misunderstood the nature of the problem: “The striking thing about this kind of proposal is it imagines there’s a problem ­ which must very occasionally arise but must be extremely rare ­ where you get some well-known but valuable copyright but you nevertheless don’t know who the owner is.”

Kay said the Academy was proposing a simpler solution: “What we would want to see is that you have to make reasonable enquiries, and if these don’t turn up who the rights holder is, you can legally use the work.

“If the rights holder subsequently does turn up ­ which will happen in one case in a thousand ­ you may then have to pay them something which they could reasonably have asked for if you’d known who they were.”