European Commissioner Kroes addresses orphan works issue

European Commission Vice-President -and commissioner for the Digital Agenda- Neelie Kroes today outlined her vision on a European online archive, at the IFFRO intellectual property conference in Brussels. She endeavors to massively increase the number of European art and other creative works that are available online. “Europe can offer much more to the cyber-world: by digitising and putting online our rich cultural heritage,” Kroes said.

Although it is a great idea to make historic works available online and accessible for every citizen, an important issue of copyright law makes the realisation of this ambition quite difficult.

Many creative works cannot be included in online collections because they are so-called “orphan works.”  A work of art can be orphanised if it is impossible to establish who holds the copyrights of the document. Copyrights for many old books and pictures cannot be traced back. Many times the people entitled to the copyrights are unaware of it.

However, the general principle of copyright law is that the owner of the copyrights has to give permission for the distribution of the work. This means you can use an orphan work in practice, until the legal owner finds out. If such an orphanised work of historic value is posted online, there’s always a chance that some distant relative of the long gone author stands up and claims the rights to the artefact.

The subsequent threat of lawsuits keeps these works from public eyes. To counter this Kroes is pushing for a Commission-backed project called “ARROW” to become Europe’s official portal for essential rights information. “I have a vision: One search in ARROW should be all you should need to determine the copyright status of a cultural good in Europe;” Kroes said. “ARROW should become a one-stop shop for determining, easily and quickly, with full legal certainty, whether a work is orphan or not, out-of-distribution or not.”

Source:  European Union Newsroom, SPEECH/11/163