The UK government yesterday announced new rules on access to orphan works. You can see details here:

Although the headline is “UK opens access to 91 million orphan works”, the reality is a little more prosaic.  The new rules allow the UK Intellectual Property Office to grant users a licence to use an orphan work on payment of a fee and on the provision of evidence that a ‘diligent search’ has been undertaken to find the copyright owner.

The rule allowing re-use after diligent search has been part of copyright law in the UK for many years. The primary purpose of the new licences seems to be to provide greater certainty to re-users that the searches they have undertaken are sufficiently extensive to guarantee legal protection should the copyright owner come forward.  

Searches have to be exceptionally comprehensive before the Intellectual Property Office will certify them as ‘diligent’: 

https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/orphan-works-diligent-search-guidance-for-applicants

This may help a few GLAMs who have high-profile orphan images in their collections that they would like to use on their websites, but a real solution to the orphan works problem must await a more radical approach that goes beyond both this and the existing EU Orphan Works Directive.

Michael