From the News Release:

Access to over 50 million items held in trust by publicly funded agencies such as libraries, museums, archives and universities are being prevented from being available online due to current copyright laws. ‘In from the Cold’, a report by the Strategic Content Alliance and the Collections Trust, shows that millions of so-called ‘orphan works’ – photographs, recordings, texts and other ephemera from the last 100 years – risk becoming invisible because rights holders are not known or easy to trace.

[Snip]

The report shows how the UK is in real danger of losing 20th century materials due to the current copyright laws, the levels of resources needed to trace the rights for each orphan work and the potential lock down of access to these important works. Of the 13 million works represented in the on-line survey, it would take in the region of six million days to trace the rights holders, around 16,000 years.

The report was commissioned to find the scale and impact of ‘orphan works’ on public service delivery.

Read the Summary & Access the Complete Report

Listen to a Podcast About the Report
It runs about 12 minutes.

Source: JISC / Collections Trust/ Strategic Content Alliance

This entry was posted on Monday, June 8th, 2009 and is filed under Info Management and Retrieval, Intellectual Property, Preservation/Conservation. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.