RE: more on orphan works

["Jack Boeve" <JBoeve@xxxxxxxx>]

[Posted by the list owner on behalf of Chris Zielinski]

*****

Maybe I've missed it but nowhere in this discussion have I seen mention
of the role of collecting societies in tracing the parents - living and
dead - of orphan works. I write as someone who ran the UK Authors
Licensing and Collecting Society (ALCS) for some years.

That non-profit society collected money for copyright uses (photocopy
licenses, reciprocal agreements with foreign collecting societies,
contractual arrangements with TV, radio and other broadcasting
companies) covering all written works - poetry, scripts, novels,
academic. The actual collection of these funds was done by other
agencies - the UK Copyright Licensing Agency collected the photocopying
money reaped through licenses with the educational establishment, for
example - while ALCS devoted the entire efforts of its 30+ staff to
tracing authors and their estates and legal representatives.

We maintained our own extensive database of over 100,000 writers' names
and contact details, led campaigns to get writers to register with us,
scoured the Internet, magazines, radio and TV listings, broadcaster's
databases, literary agencies, friends-of-friends and other networks -
just to find the authors of works for which we had collected money. We
had to deal with the understandable suspicion of writers who we
contacted out of the blue with a magical cheque for a work they had
written years ago, and maybe almost forgotten.

So there is a viable non-profit mechanism in the UK and many other
countries (certainly in all the countries responsible for most of the
world's book production) actively engaged in tracing the authors of
works. Anyone seeking copyright clearances could always approach these
bodies. The association grouping all of these societies is the
International Confederation of Societies of Authors and Composers, known
by its French acronym called CISAC which has a rather user-unfriendly
search page to its public directory accessible at
http://www.cisac.org/CisacPortal/menu.do?method=change&menu=tools&item=i
tem1

As a small supplementary comment, while I am personally against long
copyright terms (and generally hold the view that there is an access
right to "essential information" - which can be, and has been, defined -
particularly for developing countries), I find it perfectly valid that
copyright should persist beyond the death of the author. Quite a few
writers earn nothing during their lives, and only really succeed
posthumously. Why shouldn't their long-suffering families finally
benefit, just like people inheriting money from fathers and mothers in
other professions?

Best,

Chris
Technical Coordinator, Research for Health WHO Region for Africa
Sub-Regional Office in Harare, Zimbabwe
E: zielinskic@xxxxxxx and zielinskic@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx