Featured in this report: Culture, heritage & leisure
These are likely to range from works with high commercial value, such as fine art and commercial films with attributable artists and/or rights holders and collecting societies, to works of low commercial value but high academic, cultural and historic worth, such as documentary photographs, letters and sound recordings, where a recognised rights holder is unlikely.
Public sector organisations have a critical role as content brokers to other public sector organisations, to users and to the commercial sector, particularly the creative industries. In their capacity as custodians of this content, they will often straddle the mutually inclusive roles of both rights users and rights holders of this content. As rights users, they will be obliged to seek permission for providing online public access to the vast majority of content still in copyright that they own.
The extent of copyright duration in much of this material, as well as the likelihood that many of these works in copyright are likely to have been created by amateurs, means that a significant proportion of works owned by public sector bodies include those whereby the rights holder is unknown or cannot be traced, or so-called ‘orphan works’.
The huge scale and significant impact of orphan works, conservatively estimated to be some 25 million items across public sector organisations, has led to a ‘locking up’ of content with little or no prospect of these items ever making a meaningful contribution to a knowledge economy without potentially complex and costly ‘due diligence’ processes.
The flow of public sector content and the maximisation of the potential of its value is being disrupted by both the resources necessary to manage copyright and, in particular, orphan works. Despite the recognised extent, impact and problem of orphan works, particularly for digitisation activities across the globe, there has been a lack of credible evidence to evaluate the scale of the problem across the public sector in the UK. The absence of such an evidence base means that it is nearly impossible to address this problem legislatively and/or through the implementation of suitable licensing schemes. It also means that the problem cannot be managed nor solutions sought to prevent the occurrence of these works in the future.
In recognition of the substantial obstacles created by orphan works across the public sector, as well as the lack of a statistically viable evidence base to underpin any potential solutions, the Collections Trust and the Strategic Content Alliance have been working together on a joint initiative to assess the impact of orphan works on the delivery of services to the public. The ‘in from the cold’ project is the first research of its kind surveying the extent of Orphan Works across the UK’s public sector, drawing on international responses as well as qualitative data from over 80 UK-based public sector bodies.
The aim of this project has been four-fold:
Read the project research case study to find out more.
