New Orphan Works Directive

[owly]

As of now institutions can finally start digitizing Orphan Works.

Directive http://europa.eu/rapid/pressReleases...guiLanguage=en

[rogue_librarian]

Sorry, but this is just a directive. While binding, in principle, it still means that the individual member states have yet to transpose that into national law. It's (usually) not directly applicable.

To quote:

The Directive will formally enter into force in the coming weeks further to its publication in the Official Journal of the European Union. Member States will have two years to transpose it into national law.

[Elfwreck]

Woo-hoo! More online archives of "it's legal in THIS region but not THAT one; please don't download if it's not legal in your area." And an endless swarm of flamewars about which books should or shouldn't be available in that archive.

[owly]

But at least it's a step in the right direction.

[murraypaul]

Originally Posted by Elfwreck

Woo-hoo! More online archives of "it's legal in THIS region but not THAT one; please don't download if it's not legal in your area."

Once a work is declared orphan in the EU country it was first published, it gains that status throughout the EU, so each EU archive could be legally accessed by any EU citizen.
That was the reason for having an EU directive, rather than having individual countries approach the problem themselves. (As France was doing)

[teh603]

If the EU just decided that, it means the US is going to do a release in about three weeks that all orphaned works are to be granted perpetual copyright and become un-distributable.

Cause the US likes to be "better" than the EU, and usually goes about it in the exact wrong way.

[HarryT]

Originally Posted by owly

But at least it's a step in the right direction.

But it's entirely incorrect to make the claim "As of now institutions can finally start digitizing Orphan Works." That's simply not true.

[Namekuseijin]

Originally Posted by Elfwreck

Woo-hoo! More online archives of "it's legal in THIS region but not THAT one; please don't download if it's not legal in your area." And an endless swarm of flamewars about which books should or shouldn't be available in that archive.

national regions still exist outside the boundless borders of the internet?

[Giggleton]

Originally Posted by HarryT

But it's entirely incorrect to make the claim "As of now institutions can finally start digitizing Orphan Works." That's simply not true.

I don't think it's entirely incorrect, if the institution has the hardware and the works they can digitize as much as they want, who are you to say that they cannot?

[speakingtohe]

Originally Posted by Giggleton

I don't think it's entirely incorrect, if the institution has the hardware and the works they can digitize as much as they want, who are you to say that they cannot?

Of course they can, but it is not always legal, moral or ethical. For one thing you or I or any university, cannot just decide a book is an orphaned work.

A certain effort must be made to determine this. And of course even if the rights holder does not respond, which they are under no legal or moral or ethical obligation to do so, they can still decide to sue you and would likely win.

AFAIK any book that is still in print or sold in bookstores is not orphaned.

Even public domain books contain some caveats. A forward or illustrations, for example or even formatting can not be included if they were added recently (last 50 years or so) without permission.

Helen

[Giggleton]

Originally Posted by speakingtohe

Of course they can, but it is not always legal, moral or ethical. For one thing you or I or any university, cannot just decide a book is an orphaned work.

A certain effort must be made to determine this. And of course even if the rights holder does not respond, which they are under no legal or moral or ethical obligation to do so, they can still decide to sue you and would likely win.

AFAIK any book that is still in print or sold in bookstores is not orphaned.

Even public domain books contain some caveats. A forward or illustrations, for example or even formatting can not be included if they were added recently (last 50 years or so) without permission.

Helen

IMO,

Once a book is printed/viewed by an other, the book becomes public knowledge. If the book is at any time not being viewed it is an orphan. It is then imperative for the betterment of all that the book be viewed. Anything that can be done to achieve this goal is ethical and moral.

I suppose we can view morality on a sliding scale though, mass free distribution of a "non-owned" text would be at one end, while the selling of a single pirated copy would be on another, I do not advocate either because I cannot.

We would probably need to create the technological utopia before we can determine on a second by second basis whether any text is being viewed but if we can imagine it, it is already done.

It is probably best to just think of every work as an orphan work, but not in an abandoned sense, every text has a creator who once the text is "finished" sets the book free unto the world. If our digital texts still contain links back to their creator the onus of compensation will always rely on the reader, as it should.

It's funny but it appears to me that a large portion of our mobile entertainment these days is sent to us pre-payment, sometimes ad-supported, sometimes not. Payment can remove ads, or payment can simply be a good faith donation to the creator. I am sure many of us have used this type of compensation method much more frequently recently. It is the way.

[Elfwreck]

Originally Posted by speakingtohe

Of course they can, but it is not always legal, moral or ethical. For one thing you or I or any university, cannot just decide a book is an orphaned work.

A certain effort must be made to determine this. And of course even if the rights holder does not respond, which they are under no legal or moral or ethical obligation to do so, they can still decide to sue you and would likely win.

AFAIK any book that is still in print or sold in bookstores is not orphaned.

Any book still in print is not orphaned. "Sold in bookstores" is not an indication of lack of orphan status; publishers with non-exclusive rights can continue to print while the copyright holder can't be found.

Even public domain books contain some caveats. A forward or illustrations, for example or even formatting can not be included if they were added recently (last 50 years or so) without permission.

I would love to see a lawsuit directed at publishers for claiming copyright on the whole work, when the only part copyrighted is the forward and formatting, on the grounds that they're fraudulently implying that it's illegal to copy the actual text in order to drive up their own sales.

I'd love to see a copyright law that declares that the copyright statement has to say *what* is copyrighted--that a book can only say "copyright by [publisher]" if publisher holds the rights to the entire work; otherwise it'd have to say "forward, table of contents, illustrations, index, and page layout copyright by [publisher]," or something like that.

I'm not sure page layouts can even be copyrighted, for most books. Phone books aren't copyrightable (in the US) because they're just lists of data; non-artistic formatting might be uncopyrightable. House of Leaves has copyrightable layouts; the average mystery novel might not.

[SteveEisenberg]

Originally Posted by Giggleton

Payment can remove ads, or payment can simply be a good faith donation to the creator.

Do I understand you to be in favor of a new kind of DRM that stops people from removing ads from books until they pay for them?

Someone will surely break that DRM. I hope you will agree with me that they need some kind of legal sanction.

I am sure many of us have used this type of compensation method much more frequently recently.

And others have used it less frequently.

Giving away books in return for contributions has long worked for some religious books. And it probably could also work for books that raise passionate partisan feelings, like campaign biographies. But authors without a political or religious ax to grind would be at a disadvantage.

Also a problem is that most good non-fiction (and much good fiction) is created by a team including author, agent, editor, graphic artist, etc. So the contribution needs to go not a person, but to a business organization which arranges that all the people on the creative team get paid. It seems pretty unlikely to me that turning Random House into a charity is going to work.

[Giggleton]

Originally Posted by SteveEisenberg

Do I understand you to be in favor of a new kind of DRM that stops people from removing ads from books until they pay for them?

No, I would rather read non-crippled versions of texts and choose to compensate the creator of my own free will.

In the meantime, ads seem to help some creators get compensated, while at the same time not forcing the reader/user to do anything, even if that something is as simple as pressing a "click this button to send monies" button.

I would like to say, if the ads are non-obtrusive, then it is my belief that those who go about creating tools to strip the ads from software and texts would no longer feel the need to do so. (I find all ads to be obtrusive which is why if I enjoy a text with ad placement I click the send monies button as soon as I can(so that the ads are removed))There is a group of people who might wish to remove all DRM from a text in order that they may then redistribute the text under their own terms, but we cannot design a distribution system around the whims of these people.

Unlikelier things have happened.

[SteveEisenberg]

Originally Posted by Giggleton

. . . if I enjoy a text with ad placement I click the send monies button as soon as I can(so that the ads are removed) . . .

I'm not aware of authors who now work like this. Any names?

Even if it is working for a few authors, that doesn't mean it would work as a commonplace method of author payment. I might be marginally generous enough to make a contribution to a seemingly deserving software or book author once every year or two, but I'm not about to do it several times a month.

However, I don't want to come down too hard on you. I believe you are genuinely trying to come up with workable ways to compensate authors in a world without DRM and in which piracy is risk-free. At least you don't try to claim that if publishers ignore piracy, lower their prices, and take away DRM, authors can then live off of voluntarily paid low prices.