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UK Passes "Instagram Act"
kodiaktau writes "The UK govt passed the Enterprise and Regulatory Reform Act which effectively makes so-called 'orphaned' content posted on social media sites public domain. Corporations now only need to have made a "diligent search" to find the owner of the content before use. From the article: 'The Act contains changes to UK copyright law which permit the commercial exploitation of images where information identifying the owner is missing, so-called "orphan works", by placing the work into what's known as "extended collective licensing" schemes. Since most digital images on the internet today are orphans - the metadata is missing or has been stripped by a large organization - millions of photographs and illustrations are swept into such schemes.'"
Now does this mean that big corporations can scoop up these so-called "orphaned works" and then place their own copyright on them, or do they stay in public domain in perpetuity? If so that wouldn't be so bad, other than "diligent search" sounds like sending my teenage daughter into the other room to find something sitting behind something else.
I got here through a series of tubes
a) find image you want to use at site X
b) have someone strip the the image of identifying information and repost it at site Y
c) discover image at site Y lacking traceable information
d) do "due dilligence" based on image from site Y
e) declare image from site Y as 'orphaned'
f) PROFIT
My first thought was that happening on accident. I've had text and code copied and posted with no attribution before, which would now make it public domain if in the UK? Doing that on purpose is easy though, and perhaps more of an issue.
Does this only apply to works where the copy right holder (which must be unknown) is in the UK? If so, this law means nothing. If not, it violated the international copyright treaty requiring respecting the copyright in the country of origin. Seems broken either way.
Anyway, someone please seed anonymized torrents in the UK. As long as its properly anonymized, we can all reseed it legally, since it a orphaned works from the UK, right? Just do a "diligent search", which finds no owner, and you're set!
How is it possible that copyright not only keeps being extended to prevent works of corporations from entering the public domain, but now other laws start stripping rights of the public for their own works for the benefit of corporations?
We can't get access to orphaned films that are not available for sale?
I believe that should be part of ANY copyright law. In order for copyright to be maintained. A work of art must be available for sale within a 5 year period. Stop selling it, and you lose your copyright.
No...it means don't allow anyone else in the world to find/scan/copy your work and post it online or they own it. You don't have to ever post something online yourself to be affected by this.
It doesn't make any sense because The Register is full of shit as usual. This isn't a free for all. This is enabling legislation for one or more future (or present) licensing bodies to search for owners of apparent "orphan works" - works that at the moment cannot be used by anyone - and issue licenses.
There's pros and cons to that. With the biggest question, does the licensing body charge for licenses, and if so who gets the money.
What this is not is a law that will make it legal for any person, company or corporation to decide themselves that a work is an orphan, and so do what they want with it.
http://www.out-law.com/en/articles/2013/april/copyright-law-reforms-in-pipeline-after-royal-assent-given-to-enterprise-and-regulatory-reform-bill/
"Under the Government's plans, organisations that wish to use orphan works would have to conduct a 'diligent search' for the owner of orphan works before they could use the material. The searches would have to be verified as diligent by independent authorising bodies. In addition, organisations would have to pay a "market rate" to use orphan works so as rights holders could be recompensed for the use of the works if they were later identified."
That is a good point about the treaties. Thus the law is only applicable in the hilarious circumstance where they can say to a judge, "We know the owner is a U.K. citizen, but we don't know who."
If it's not worth enough to go to the bother of registering it then it's not worth adding to the legal quagmire that is default copyright.
The problem with this is that a picture I take might be worth something, but that worth is less than what it would cost me in time/effort to get the money out of it (as opposed to an established publisher or news organization), so I don't. This legislation basically lets those established players hoover up that stuff and get money out of it, but without ever having to compensate the author.
Anything I post is small and watermarked. It is a sad statement about our online society. This means I do not participate in sites like Flikr and many others - too many tales of stolen images, copyright nightmares, etc. A lot of the sites are one0sided in their terms - suddenly THEY own your pictures, forever.
In October last year there was this article about this issue:
http://petapixel.com/2012/10/10/what-famous-photos-would-look-like-if-their-photogs-used-ugly-watermarks/
The UK has not made any friends by passing this law.
I feel oddly compelled to point out that self-destructing documents were one of the proposed uses of DRM.
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