[x-pubpol] Orlowski on the ERR bill

[Joly MacFie]

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2012/07/11/err_bill_copyright_amendment/

(extract)

... new amendments, tacked onto the Enterprise and Regulatory Reform
(ERR) bill  <http://www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/bills/cbill/2012-2013/0007/cbill_2012-20130007_en_6.htm#pt6-pb1-l1g56>
yesterday...



Last week the government proposed a collectivisation programme to
sweep away individual copyrights across any class of work, to allow
"broad commercial use" of those works.

Such measures are illegal under the Berne Convention, legal experts
tell us, and may result in costly litigation lasting years. The phrase
"orphan work" can refer to any copyright artifact where the ownership
information is missing, which in practice, means every photograph or
image on the internet.

So Britain's copyright radicals at the Intellectual Property Office -
formerly known the Patent Office but reborn as a hotbed of ideological
radicalism in recent years - appear to be in a desperate hurry. Why
would this be?

Well, a draft European Directive on orphan works is in the pipeline.
While this has been fiercely criticised by creators' rights groups, it
offers the individual creator much more protection than the scheme
favoured by the UK.

For example, the UK would allow broad commercial use of orphans - the
European Commission specifically excludes it. Crucially, however, the
European legislation would leave any member state'sexisting collective
licensing programme intact. This would appear to be a very strong
motive for the IPO to ram through what it can, while it can.

Legal experts tell is that even if the UK's go-it-alone collective
licensing becomes law, it would have to comply with European
directives, and the government's doesn't.

<snip>

Today we don't yet have the technical infrastructure to identify works
and clear rights, even though image identification technology has
largely caught up with the problem – every photograph on the internet
can and should have the ownership metadata attached.

But large organisations that would like to exploit your stuff –
ranging from Associated Newspapers and the BBC to Google – argue that
they should merely need to perform a "diligent search" for the owner
of an image, and if this draws a blank, should be free to go ahead and
use it.

The phrase "diligent search" appears in the ERR Bill. A "diligent
search" defined today, in the absence of a rights registry, is not
what it would be if users were obliged to check the database
thoroughly. If you're Google, you're going to be screaming for this
legislation PDQ.
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