Brussels, 15/03/2011 (Agence Europe) - The European Union must speed up digitisation of its cultural works and find a solution to the challenge of orphan works, the stumbling block of the process, at a time when the United States is developing a complex judicial arsenal to resolve copyright issues, Digital Strategy Commissioner Neelie Kroes told an ARROW (Accessible Registries of Rights Information and Orphan Works) consortium conference on 10 March. “The Digital Agenda for Europe, our ICT policy agenda through to 2020, would simply not be complete if we ignored the content dimension of our vision for the future”, the commissioner said. Currently, the number of orphan works (those works with no known rights holders) varies from around 20% for films and slightly less for books to up to 90% for photography, a truly staggering figure, which presents a real problem for progress in digitisation of works, Kroes said.
The European Commission is currently working on innovative, practical solutions to this issue. It is working on a proposal for a directive which will permit the digitising of orphan works in such projects as Europeana, the European digitised library, while protecting the legitimate interests of copyright holders. The Comité des sages set up last year to consider options has set down a number of markers, including the use of instruments such as the ARROW project, the commissioner said. “ARROW should become a one-stop shop for determining, easily and quickly, with full legal certainty, whether a work is orphan or not, out-of-distribution or not”, Kroes stated. The system is still at the validation stage but its potential is enormous and shows how rights holders can work together to form a new digital future for Europe, she went on.
The ARROW project, which was launched in November 2008, is co-funded by the European Commission under the eContentPlus programme (€2.5 million). Developed essentially for research on books and magazines, it seeks to identify rights holders and to clarify the copyright situation of a work, including establishing whether or not it is out of print or an orphan work. Currently, the project is about to enter the second phase of development - ARROW +. Also co-funded by the Commission, it will be open to a wider number of partners and will also deal with visual works. (I.L./transl.rt)