Europe Creates Orphan Works Registry, Copyright ID System; Digitises EU Content

A European Commission-backed project to identify copyright holders and define orphan works – whose copyright owners cannot be found – recently presented its results and is heading to a second phase with more partners. The project advances the European effort at digitalising content through the Europeana project, a competing project to the Google Books project.

The Accessible Registries of Rights Information and Orphan Works towards Europeana (ARROW) was created as a European network of certified sources of information to determine if a work is in print or out of print, find the rights holders or collective management organisations in order to obtain permission to digitise the work, or declare that the work is an orphan work (for which the copyright holder is unknown.)

ARROW is a public-private project coordinated by the Italian Publishers Association. It is funded half by the European Commission, and half by the contracting partners, which are both public institutions and private entities, according to Olav Stokkmo, chief executive and secretary general of the International Federation of Reproduction Rights Organisations (IFRRO), one of the contracting partners.

The key elements of the project include provision of an infrastructure of bibliographic and rights information resources with a particular focus on libraries that conduct searches for rights holders, according to ARROW’s presentation of its project results last month in Brussels. A second element is to set up a European registry of orphan works.

ARROW is a consortium of European national libraries, authors, publishers, and collective management organisations. It was launched in November 2008 and was supposed to run for 30 months, until May 2011.

However, Piero Attanasio, head of the ARROW project management team, said at the 10 March event [PDF] presenting the results, that the initiative would be taken further through the “ARROW plus” project.

ARROW plus is a European Commission-sponsored “best practice project,” according to Stokkmo, which has the aim of deploying the ARROW project throughout Europe, and “to broaden its scope in terms of the type of works for which ARROW enables search for rights information,” he told Intellectual Property Watch.

ARROW plus includes a “separate work package that will examine how ARROW can be used to search for rights information in still images such as photos, illustrations, visual arts work,” and such, he said, primarily when those are included in books.

The Brussels conference was opened by Neelie Kroes, European Commission Vice President and Digital Agenda Commissioner. She said that if the project were embedded in the “forthcoming Directive on orphan works, ARROW could become the official portal in Europe where you can find essential rights information and do automated searches of rights holders and copyrights.”

ARROW’s current contracting and associated partners include EU libraries such as the Biblioteca Nacional of Spain, The British Library; publishers associations such as the Italian Publishers Association; reproduction rights organisations such as the Copyright Licensing Agency, Kopiosto Copyright Society (Finland), and Copy-dan Writing (Danemark); collecting societies representing authors, such as LIRA (NL); and international organisations such as the Federation of European Publishers, and the International Federation of Reproduction Rights Organisations (IFRRO).

Europeana: Digitising European Culture, With IP Rights

Europeana is a European Commission-funded European digital library aimed at digitising resources from Europe’s museums, libraries, archives and audiovisual collection and making them available to the public under terms of use. Launched in 2008, the project is housed in the National Library of the Netherlands.

According to Stokkmo, Europeana does not digitise and make available works itself. Rather, “it is a portal into collections that are digitised and made available by collaborating libraries and other institutions.”

ARROW “enables the collaborating libraries” to search for information on rights, authors and publishers, and the status of those rights, he said.

In January, a report from a high-level reflection group on digitisation of Europe’s cultural heritage called for EU members to “step up their efforts to put online the collections held in all their libraries, archives and museums,” according to a press release.

The report recommended that the Europeana portal “become the central reference point for Europe’s online cultural heritage,” that works still covered by copyrights but no longer commercially distributed be brought online, with retribution to right holders, and that the EU rules for orphan works be adopted as soon as possible.

In February 2010, members of the European Parliament said Europeana needed content from more member states. IP rights should be respected, they said, but “digitisation should not restrict access to Europe’s public heritage,” according to a press release.

According to the Europeana website, compared to Google Book Search, “Europeana is a cultural project and not a commercial undertaking.” It also “has a broader remit than a service such as Google Book Search,” and Europeana “gives access to different types of content from various cultural institutions. This makes it possible to bring together the works of a painter with, for example, relevant archival documents and books written about the artist’s life.”

The ARROW business model was published in February this year, describing its business architecture, funding model and budget, according to a release.

According to Stokkmo, the ARROW business model [pdf] is still a work in progress, because of the extension of the project. Users of the system will pay for its use, and three models are foreseen, he said. The first is a pay per use model, the second is a subscription model for large-scale users, and the third model is a fee of € 0.0011 per inhabitant offered to EU member states, the European Economic Area countries, and Switzerland “for the free use of the basic ARROW functions by public institutions in those countries.”

Stokkmo said that using ARROW to search for copyright information represents substantial time and cost benefits compared to the traditional manual search for such information. Pilot countries using the system saved substantial time, he said.