3 ms·

This sounds terrible. First of all the use of 'diligent search' in the legislation. What constitutes a diligent search? The worst bit however is that if this tu

This sounds terrible. First of all the use of 'diligent search' in the legislation. What constitutes a diligent search? The worst bit however is that if this turns up nothing the user of the 'orphan' work now has the ability to become the owner of it AND license it to others. As the site says "This gives the green light to a new content scraping industry, an industry which doesn't have to pay the originator a penny." It seems like the government tried to do something good here and really didn't think it through.

voyou 14y ago
The user of an orphaned work can't become the owner - the legislation specifically prohibits granting users of orphaned works exclusive rights. Because of this, sublicencing seems like a non-issue, because anyone who could sublicense an orphaned work from a user of that work, could just directly license it from whatever body licenses orphaned works.
Silhouette 14y ago
There is a genuine problem with orphan works, but normally (IME) the term refers to obscure or older works where there copyright holder can't be identified or contacted for an extended period. I can't find the final text of this Act on any official source yet, but if the wording "diligent search" is all there is then that certainly sounds a lot like "Well, I Googled for the first two words of the book and couldn't find an obvious owner, so now I can resell it" territory. What I haven't seen anyone explain so far, and again can't check for myself until the final wording is published somewhere accessible, is what happens if someone starts copying/sublicensing an "orphan" work and then the copyright holder finds out and identifies themselves. In earlier discussions about orphan works, which have been going on for years and covered by several public reviews at this point, this issue never seemed to be dealt with in a satisfactory way.

voyou 14y ago

The user of an orphaned work can't become the owner - the legislation specifically prohibits granting users of orphaned works exclusive rights. Because of this, sublicencing seems like a non-issue, because anyone who could sublicense an orphaned work from a user of that work, could just directly license it from whatever body licenses orphaned works.

Silhouette 14y ago

There is a genuine problem with orphan works, but normally (IME) the term refers to obscure or older works where there copyright holder can't be identified or contacted for an extended period. I can't find the final text of this Act on any official source yet, but if the wording "diligent search" is all there is then that certainly sounds a lot like "Well, I Googled for the first two words of the book and couldn't find an obvious owner, so now I can resell it" territory. What I haven't seen anyone explain so far, and again can't check for myself until the final wording is published somewhere accessible, is what happens if someone starts copying/sublicensing an "orphan" work and then the copyright holder finds out and identifies themselves. In earlier discussions about orphan works, which have been going on for years and covered by several public reviews at this point, this issue never seemed to be dealt with in a satisfactory way.