On Saturday, Publishing Perspectives had an interesting story about the problem of digitizing orphan works in Europe. It’s a little hard to count them, given that different countries use different standards for orphanhood, but a European Commission report (PDF) guesses that there are about three million orphan books—books that are still in copyright but whose owners are difficult or impossible to locate—across its member countries.
Among the key findings of the report, which also considers orphan films, photographs, newspapers and music, was that the biggest obstacle to digitization is not the cost of the digitization process itself, but that of clearing rights and the immense number of man hours involved. The report found, for example, one UK project spent £70,000 to clear the rights to digitize 1,400 posters from the 1980’s, while a Dutch project to digitize 500,000 photographs and 5,000 films budgeted €625 000 just to pay for rights.
And only 5-25% of works, the report estimates, are successfully cleared per project.
Norway has an interesting program that allows limited public use of orphaned works in return for a per-page fee, which the commission thinks might serve as one possible model for the rest of Europe.
Orphan works were one of the major points of contention in the dispute over Google’s digitization of copyrighted works for Google Books. Given the difficulty of obtaining permission for each one, Google chose to go with an opt-out system, and critics in the publishing industry felt it should be opt-in. Under the settlement, Google funds an organization where rights-holders of orphan works can come forward to be paid for the use of those works.
If nothing else, at least the uproar surrounding Google’s plans brought the issue to prominence for the rest of the world. Without some kind of solution for converting orphan works to digital form, the e-book revolution threatens to leave a huge number of printed books behind.
“opt-in” doesn’t solve the problem–indeed, it leaves us all right where we started. The issue of rights is often so complicated that the authors themselves don’t know who has the rights to their work.
Part of the problem is that the various copyright offices are so overloaded that they can’t maintain any kind of records at all. If there were some central organization that kept track of who had the rights to what, then this whole problem wouldn’t exist.
…which is where Google comes in, because they have the cash necessary to absorb the inevitable lawsuits.