[Advocacy Advisors] New UK government copyright rules on access to orphan works

Thu Oct 30 18:56:07 UTC 2014

The situation in the US is even worse. There is no orphan works legislation
in the U.S. whatsoever, so if you can't locate the author, you can't use
the work (without significant financial risk). What's even worse is that
the U.S. is one of the few countries in the world that doesn't recognize
the rule of the shorter term (despite it being recommended by the Berne
Convention), so a large number of works are orphan works in the U.S. but
public domain elsewhere.

Because there is no orphan works legislation in the U.S., there is some
potential for reform here. I just hope that we can steer that reform into
getting the U.S. to adopt the rule of the shorter term (which will actually
help the Wikimedia projects), rather than just a band-aid tailored
specifically for GLAM institutions (as many European countries have
adopted).

Ryan Kaldari
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