Digitization of ‘orphan works’ in the US

Several universities in the United States are jointly working on a project to offer their students and researchers access to orphan works via an online library.

At the moment, almost ten million works are available in the HathiTrust Digital Library. The universities joined in the Orphan Works Project aim to add orphan works to this online library. It’s hard to say how many of these ten million works are orphan works. Copyright protected works become orphan works if it is unknown who the copyright holder is.

"We look forward to working with our colleagues on this initiative, which will not only benefit our respective users and our individual institutions, but also demonstrate the importance of working collaboratively through HathiTrust to increase access to knowledge," said Winston Tabb, Sheridan Dean of University Libraries and Museums at Johns Hopkins University.

The digital works are only available to students, employees and researchers of the organizations cooperating in the Orphan Works Project. Many of the orphan works in the digital library were not accessible for students before. Tens of thousands of orphan works are expected to be available in the first year.

At the moment, digitization of orphan works is an important source of legal disputes. For example, a judge rejected a settlement between Google Books and various authors and publishers last May, because the judge thought it went to far to grant Google Books the right to make orphan works accessible online without consent of the copyright holders. Because the Orphan Works Project limits the accessibility of the orphan works to students, employees and researchers, the digitization on HathiTrust can be seen as ‘fair use’ for scientific purposes under U.S. copyright legislation.

Read more about orphan works on FutureofCopyright.com:

• Scope of new EU directive on orphan works subject of debate
• Dutch government presents new policy on copyright
• European Commissioner Kroes addresses orphan works issue

Reference: Duke Today

By: Karen Groen