Report on Orphan Works Challenges: for libraries, archives, and other memory institutions | Center for Social Media
peter.suber's bookmarks 2013-09-26
Summary:
"Orphan works pose significant challenges to nonprofit libraries, archives, and other memory institutions. When these institutions seek to reuse orphan works—copyrighted works whose owners cannot be located—they face the perceived risk of costly infringement suits from copyright owners who might later emerge. But libraries, archives and other memory institutions hold many orphan works in their collections, and risk averse institutions that do not make these works available may fail to fulfill part of their core missions of preserving cultural and intellectual artifacts and providing access to users in a format and context that is reasonably available to those users. The fear of liability for providing access to orphan works thus threatens memory institutions’ ability to serve their primary purposes as repositories of human culture, history, and accrued knowledge.
Because of the obstacles that orphan works pose to memory institutions and others, policymakers and affected institutions in the United States and internationally have recently renewed efforts to craft solutions to the orphan works problem, including through policy reform[1] and through existing legal mechanisms, such as fair use. This renewed interest in addressing the challenges posed by orphan works arises alongside additional efforts to address copyright challenges, including reform to the library protections in Section 108 of the United States Copyright Act and community-based best practices to help deal with complex copyright questions (especially those regarding fair use).
This Report synthesizes research on specific orphan works-related challenges faced by the community of libraries, archives, and other memory institutions, including historical societies, museums, and many others. The Report concludes with recommendations based on that research for meeting these challenges...."