Below, two first-hand, anonymous reports: ________________________________
The summary below covers most of the topics discussed (also talked about why commercial users are important distributors of content, and -- never long enough -- about why there's no "piggybacking" allowed in proposed US legislation --- meaning, once a work is found by someone to be orphaned, why don't we require at least that those works be indexed/accessible somehow making a further use more likely?). But there's a larger point/purpose that the summary below may miss: the program served a diverse audience, many of whom do not have the amount of information and expertise "insiders" have. The very large size of the audience -- on a Tuesday night in NYC? a panel on orphan works? -- was a strong indicator that more people are starting to feel the need for more information. Also, there were a lot of lawyers in the audience who heard why this shouldn't be in lawyers' hands! Many of those interested in the practicalities think we just have to keep pushing on the point that there is no real solution being presented, at present. We need legislation, we need "business"/tech solutions -- and we need to deal with the international dimension of the problem, which was only addressed briefly. If Congress thinks no one is interested anymore (or that a private solution is going to emerge and take care of the problem entirely), that's not helpful. So programs such as these also serve the purpose of keeping the issue visible.... ------------ An expected cast of characters from different points of view. The photographers, the museums (Gugg), CCC, Maria Pallante, and 2 other guys who didn't contribute much. Maria explained where we are(senate passed a bill but house didn't get to it in time because of presidential elections, so it died and has to be reintroduced. The bill used to be 29 pages but is now just one (all on copyright.gov), lots of talk about registries and image recognition, esp technical impracticality but inevitability of both. Think about adding metadata and uploading to a registry all the images a pro photographer would take In one week alone daunting! Discussions happening with software companies (adobe, aperture, etc.) about auto addition of meta data during post production work of photographers and illustrators. None of this helps out the small time orphaned work (copyright holder for small but nice painting in museum storage). Discussion about reducing the pool of orphaned works by changing the duration laws [not likely!]. Discussion of sliding scale on penalties vis extent of use vis infringement. On the whole there were no solutions - only puzzles to keep lawyers busy. It sounded like 30 steps forward in detailing the issues and 29 steps back in inability to resolve any of them. WIPO meeting in Spain(?) right now looking at same issues. Not much new! .....
