Update from France

From British poet, historian, and Laboratorium commenter Gillian Spraggs comes this detailed discussion of the implementation of France’s new orphan books legislation. It is the best source I am aware of in the English language for a ground-level view of the French legislation in action. She wrote extraordinarily helpful analyses of the Google Books settlement for U.K. authors and she finds many of the same troubling features in the new French scheme.

In particular, it appears that the metadata and search interface to the database of putative orphans are both atrocious. Spraggs’s post details more than a dozen books by foreign authors that are not plausibly orphan works, but were or are in the database nonetheless. This, it will be recalled, was a significant problem with HathiTrust’s abortive Orphan Works Project. Every time an orphan works trial flunks its basic due diligence, it undercuts the case for orphan works reform; just as the criminal antics of Righthaven and Prenda Law undercut the case for copyright enforcement against individual downloaders.