Ten Years Later, The EU Orphan Works Directive Is Officially A Failure – Just As The Copyright Industry Intended
from the rarely-applied-in-practice dept
Every so often, Techdirt writes about the long-standing problem of orphan works, the huge collection of older creations that are out of circulation and have no obvious owners. Arguably, they should be called “hostage works”, since they remain uselessly locked away by rigid and outdated copyright laws, to no one’s benefit. Despite that, the copyright industry always fights hard against the outrageous idea that we should make it easier to bring these works back into circulation, where people can enjoy and use them.
One of the worst results of that attitude is the EU Orphan Works Directive, passed ten years ago. It started out as an honest attempt to free hostage works for the benefit of society. But along the way, the copyright industry lobbied long and hard to make the resulting law so bad as to be useless. One minor concession granted to the many critics of the final text was that the European Commission was required to submit a report by 29 October 2015 on how the Directive was working. The Commission has finally published the report (pdf) – a mere seven years late. It’s hard not to feel that the Commission delayed the publication of the report as much as possible because it is so damning. Here’s the key finding:
orphan works make up a large share of the collections of cultural heritage institutions. However, 8 years after the transposition deadline, the Directive has been rarely applied in practice. Stakeholders are divided on whether the Directive has led to improvements in the digitisation and dissemination of orphan works. The use of the exception provided by the Directive to digitise and disseminate orphan works seems to be very limited if the low number of recorded works in the EUIPO database is taken as the benchmark.
In other words, the Directive has been an embarrassing failure. Far from leading to a blossoming of culture through the renewed availability of orphan works as its original supporters hoped, it has become the legislative equivalent of abandonware. The report goes on to explain that the main reason the Directive has failed is that the process of liberating a hostage work is too “burdensome”. That’s a direct result of the copyright industry insisting on all kinds of unreasonable limitations and disproportionate “safeguards”, supposedly to stop the release of orphan works somehow undermining copyright. They were, in fact, conscious impediments designed to make the entire Directive so awkward to use that no one would bother. The belated European Commission report confirms that they have worked.
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Filed Under: copyright, directive, eu, hostage works, orphan works
Comments on “Ten Years Later, The EU Orphan Works Directive Is Officially A Failure – Just As The Copyright Industry Intended”
Indeed. The copyright industry is all about money first and culture production second and screw public access to culture. They are parasites of society. Down with the copyright industry. Lets move to abolish Copyright and get rid of the societal leeches. The value they create for society is overrated and not worth the societial costs.
So
What are they getting paid to NOT share the goods?
Pennies?
Converting the Tapes to Digital, will be the best thing they could ever do. Smaller and Durable.
Talking about Tape, Film, VHS and all the Oddball formats out there.
Re:
The point isn’t “we want to be paid for your use of our work”.
It is “mine! Don’t Touch! I don’t care if I’m not using it, it’s MINE!”
Re: Re:
Exactly that. Why are we being oppressed for if we can not access culture supposedly being made for us?
Given this news tidbit: https://torrentfreak.com/googles-permanent-deindexing-of-pirate-sites-spreads-across-europe-221216/
There’s clearly good opportunities to legit sites like meshpage, when all the pirates need to find another home to obtain their content from.
The good news doesn’t need to be restricted to the orphan works.
I appreciate that TechDirt can never miss an opportunity to bash copyright and its most ardent protectors, but where is the evidence that BigCopyright tried to block or water the EU Orphan Works Directive?
Almost by definition a work owned by a film studio or record comapny willl not meet the definition of ‘orphan’ since not only will the name of the copyright owner be known, it is highly likely that the current location of the owner will also be known.
What has made the EU approach to Orphan Works licensing such a dismal failure is the excessive EU bureaucracy. Take for example the lists of sources which in some cases need to be checked before a diligent search can be declared to have taken place. In the German implementation of the Directive there are 229 sources listed. This makes it very time consuming and expensive to conduct a diligent search.
It is worth noting that, as the report itself acknowledges, the departure of the UK from the EU seriously reduced the numbers of licensed works by around a third. Furthermore, for some vague reason the report uses the figure of 7,597 works, whereas in June 2020 (ie before Brexit) the database at the EU IPO contained 18,649 entries.
Perhaps one of the main criticisms of the EU Directive (as opposed to the UK’s own domestic orphan works licensing scheme) is that the EU Directive exluded all artistic works including photographs. This means that many museums and art galleries cannot use the system to digitize their large collections of art and early photographs by unknown authors. This taken together with the fact that projects like Google books, Gutenberg and Hathii Trust have already digitized a good deal of older European fiction and non-fiction, means that there has been far less emphasis within the EU on making orphan literary works available.
Re: Copyright lobby
Have you followed the links? What would be sufficient evidence in your mind? Do you need a photo of some MEP or EU official receiving a big envelope full of cash from a person wearing a “copyright cartel representative” t-shirt?
Anyway.
From the European Commission’s document attached to the legislative file.
https://oeil.secure.europarl.europa.eu/oeil/popups/ficheprocedure.do?reference=2011/0136(COD)&l=en
Re: Re:
This is exactly what they were caught doing, with doha/united arab emerates fossil fuel bribes…
Re: Re: Re:
Bribes made by the pro-copyright side have been known for years. “Flowers and fruit” were euphemisms used by record labels to cover money that was spent on drugs and prostitutes for the lawmakers they were trying to convince.
It’s almost like the arguments in support of copyright are so weak, the proponents have to cheat and corrupt others just to stand a chance.
Re:
The copyright industry has a vested interest in minimizing any and all completion for people attention, as each person only has so many hours in a day for content. For instance YouTube is taking eyeballs away from cable and streaming services, costing them subscriptions, and where relevant users to count to drive up adverting rates.
Also, their continuous banding on the piracy drum makes much more sense when you realize that it is a tool that is being leveraged to gradually increase their control over Internet services. They are well aware that mandatory filters for example will over block content, but then that is reducing the competition to their content, and that is what matters.
isn’t it about time that the world realised that the entertainment/copyright industries are doing their damndest to take complete control of the Internet, when it will then sell access to whichever site anyone wants to use, stating that there either is, will be or could be copyrighted entertainment media accessible on the site at some time, maybe, in the future, if not now? they wont be satisfied until they have completely fucked the Internet up by stopping it from being used in any way and by anybody except who they say! and all because, just like MP3 players and Home Video Recorders, they dont like progress in technology. the worse and really frigtening thing is every government, everywhere, is doing as much as possible to help that happen! what a crock of shit!!