Author(s): Jennifer Urban
Year: 2013
Abstract:
Over
the past several years, policy makers and private actors have developed
an evolving set of approaches for addressing the orphan works problem — a
problem that arises when “the owner of a copyrighted work cannot be
identified and located by someone who wishes to make use of the work in a
manner that requires permission of the copyright owner,” preventing
follow-on uses of works. These approaches usually attempt to address the
orphan works problem by employing some threshold mechanism to
differentiate true orphan works, to which the proposed solutions would
apply, from non-orphaned copyrighted works. Satisfying a “reasonably
diligent search” is one well-known formulation by which users can
designate works as orphaned and therefore subject to a proposed
solution, though — as this paper points out — alternative approaches
certainly exist. Regardless of the specific formulation, the search for
rightsholders (or conversely, the confirmation that no rightsholder can
be located) is an integral component of almost every orphan works
proposal. This paper examines in detail the core schemes for identifying
rightsholders among the leading orphan works regimes and proposals.
Although these schemes differ across many variables, three factors
predominate: (1) who is expected to participate in the search process,
(2) the nature and extent of the required search generally; and (3)
specifically what types of resources, tools, registries or other
information-sharing mechanisms are required or allowed.
Keywords:
Link: http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2208163