Arguably one of the most prevalent issues in the field of Intellectual Property law, both international and domestic, is that of the emerging orphan works problem. Orphan works are any original literary, pictorial or graphic illustrations, and photographs whereas the prospective user cannot readily identify and/or locate the owner(s) of the copyrighted material. This poses a legal risk of liability upon the prospective user for copyright infringement. This thesis focuses on the legal topic of copyright with an emphasis on orphan works legislation. This study compared and contrasted the experiences in the United Kingdom, Canada, and Australia which have all enacted legislation to mitigate the issue of liability to prospective users of orphaned works, to the United States which has been reluctant to do the same. Each country has used its own legislative model to mitigate the liability of orphan works. This study sought out to analyze each model as well as compare the legal, political, and economic similarities of each country to test the viability of a particular model being successful in the United States.

This dissertation assesses the Swedish and the United Kingdom (UK) legislative frameworks for cross-border copyright clearance of orphan works in mass-digitisation schemes. By reviewing relevant copyright frameworks and practices around the world, interviewing Swedish and British experts in the field of libraries and copyright, and discussing the national solutions applied in Sweden and the UK, conclusions are drawn to form a roadmap for future policy work in the area. The findings are that even though copyright clearance systems for orphan works work well in their national context, they wouldn’t be transferable to a cross-border context due to the different legal and societal traditions in the EU Member States. Solutions for cross-border access could be a general copyright law exception (which is a time-consuming process and therefore less usable in practice in the next 5-10 years), create and build on rightsholder registers with increased collaboration with CMOs, changed management of digital collections (e.g. only digitising orphan works that are in the public domain), or work towards soft legislative solutions (such as an MoU). / <p>Licens: CC BY 4.0</p>

Based on the premise that only in being accessible can the film reach its potential for history making, the contribution of the film archive to a particular film historical narrative is fragmented: the films that are extant are not necessarily available and the ones that are available are not necessarily publicly accessible. The contention of the thesis is that ‘doing’ film history in the context of the film archive should always be seen in light of an ever increasingly narrowing fragmentation of accessible material that takes place in the film archive. What is new about the contribution of this thesis is not that the film archive can be seen simultaneously as a result of a particular historical narrative as well as contributing to one, but that this debate is put in the context of copyright as a determining factor of why the accessible part of the film archive is only a partial picture. To this end, the thesis proposes a reorganisation of existing categories of analysis in the form of a cross-section of the film archive based on copyright ownership plotted against the material’s ‘availability’. By such practices as using a risk-managed approach to copyright clearance for archival digitisation projects, the film archive can be seen to act as a mediator between copyright and film historiography. On the one hand, the film archive is subjected to copyright law, against the constraints of which it can be seen to resist. On the other hand, the archive makes productive use of copyright in its involvement in the interplay between the ownership of the physical objects and the ability to control the subsequent use and dissemination of those objects. Some of these resistant and productive practices, such as found footage filmmaking as a historiographic intervention and providing access to public domain material, are analysed in the context of some of the digital access practices of EYE Film Institute Netherlands between 2002-2005, in which the film archive can be seen to actively shape access to its film archival holdings as well as a particular potential for film history writing.

The purpose of my thesis is to analyse the recent development of collective administration of rights (CRM). I have chosen this topic because of its actual impact and current changes on the field of CRM. The growing importance of the Internet and of digitisation technologies is opening up new possibilities for distributing creative content online. This is not in harmony with territorial principles of administration of right in Europe. So, there are challenges which can change the way how CRM cooperate and compete. First chapter briefly describes collective administration of rights in Czech Republic. Second chapter is focused on public licences concretely Creative commons. Their impact on CRM is unexceptionable and the national legislature has to react on this new phenomenon of licensing of copyright works. The goal of this chapter is to introduce that public licence, describe their compatibility with Czech law system and draw attention to problematic paragraphs which blocks simple and lawful way how to use them. Digitalization project such as Europeana open up the orphan works problem which is due by the fact that new digital media provide unprecedented opportunities for reutilizing 'old' existing content. There is a huge problem of right clearance of copyright and related rights which can influence...