Assessment of the Orphan works issue and Costs for Rights Clearance

Umfängliche Studie der EU-Kommission zu Verwaisten Werken mit Aussagen zur Menge der betroffenen Inhalte sowie zu den Kosten der Rechteklärung.

"In the context of the Digital Libraries initiative, the Commission has pointed out that the digitisation and online accessibility of cultural content require appropriate measures when dealing with orphan works i.e. material still in-copyright but whose right holders cannot be identified or located.
The first and fundamental challenge when dealing with the issue of orphan works is to quantify the extent of the problem, i.e. to establish reliable figures on the amount of orphan works within collections of cultural institutions in Europe. The reason for this is that digitisation projects carried out by cultural institutions have so far only been concentrated on public domain materials.

As a complement to the existing sources for information and in order to remedy the lack of data on the number of orphan works, the Commission carried out a fact finding exercise in November-December 2009.

This mission consisted of gathering facts and concrete data available from actual digitisation projects which would help to illustrate the scope of the problem of orphan works as well as the time and effort involved in rights clearance in different cultural institutions (e.g. libraries, archives, museums) as experienced within the different sectors (text, music/sound, audiovisual, visual/photography). The Commission sent requests for information to 17 representatives of cultural institutions that had previously been involved with digitisation of cultural material. The request was also distributed via mailing lists of associations such as LIBER (Association of European Research Libraries) and CENL (Foundation Conference of European National Librarians). 22 responses were altogether received."

( aus 1.1 Purpose and Methodology)