[Advocacy Advisors] Federal Register RfC on orphan works

Thu Feb 13 09:06:36 UTC 2014

2014-02-13 1:51 GMT+01:00 Luis Villa <lvilla at wikimedia.org>:
> On Wed, Feb 12, 2014 at 2:21 PM, Ryan Kaldari <rkaldari at wikimedia.org>
> wrote:
>>
>> Hey guys,
>> The U.S. Federal Register is doing an RfC and Public Roundtable on the
>> issue of orphan works. I would really like for us to take this as an
>> opportunity to push for U.S. adoption of the "rule of the shorter term", as
>> this would solve our URAA problems on Commons and free millions of orphan
>> foreign works in the U.S.
>
>
> I had been aware of this, but hadn't raised it here because most of the
> orphan works proposals I'm aware of are a lot like fair use - nice(ish) for
> lots of users, but not giving us the certainty we like to have when
> creating/distributing materials. But a rule of shorter term proposal would
> definitely give address one part of the orphan works problem in a way that
> would give us the certainty we like/need.

Greetings from Europe, where we can say "been there, done that" with
respect to Orphan Works legislation
(http://eur-lex.europa.eu/LexUriServ/LexUriServ.do?uri=OJ:L:2012:299:0005:0012:EN:PDF).

In short, the EU orphan works directive does not benefit Wikipedia for
many reasons. First, we are not among the priviledged institutions
(Article 1) and the permitted uses of orphan works are far too narrow
to help open content projects (Article 6). On top of that, the
dilligent search procedure as required by Article 3 is incompatible
with the idea of mass digitisation and the possibility to end the
orphan work status (Article 5) is fundamentally against the idea of a
lasting commons of works that can be built upon.

The consultation work by the US Federal Register should have a close
look at the way Europe did it.

I strongly recommend participation in this RfC by US based open
content projects with fundamentally different needs than, for example,
google or a public library.

Mathias