Intellectual Property Office Consultation

This page contains what we're thinking of submitting to the 2012 Intellectual Property Office Consultation

http://www.ipo.gov.uk/consult-2011-copyright

See also: Copyright consultation from 2009

Suggestions from Tom Morris:

I'm thinking of sending in a few answers to a few of the questions asked, but I'm wondering if there is any interested in rapidly producing a WMUK response. The closing date is tomorrow, so if there is any interest, we'd need to act super fast.

I'd suggest broadly the issues that are probably of direct interest to Wikimedia are as follows:

1. On orphan works, making the case for much older orphan works to go out of copyright rather than entering "orphan limbo". The proposed commercially-reusable orphan limbo is fine for commercial reusers like broadcasters or newspapers: it just means they have to do some due diligence and they can then use orphan works, safe in the knowledge that if the owner actually does turn up, they can pay market rate for it.

2. Also on orphan works, pointing out that "non-commercial" exceptions aren't actually that useful, as the moral intuition they are trying to tap into doesn't actually fall along the non-commercial vs. commercial line but along the acting for the common good vs. private profiteering line, and there are commercial uses that are for the common good (for instance, the Internet Archive might send out a book van charging 50p a copy for on-demand printed books. Commercial use, it could potentially turn a profit, although hardly one that's going to make Brewster Kahle into Bill Gates.)

3. On extended collective licensing and collecting societies, we should probably make clear what position, say, photographers or musicians who produce CC works for use in Wikimedia projects are in. And how Wikimedia works would fit in with a collective licensing situation: if someone were to take a photo of mine from Commons that's under CC BY SA, and uses it outside of the terms of the license, should they be able to pay for it through a collective licensing arrangement or through a collecting society? Part of the point of CC BY SA and free culture is to encourage people to use the works under the terms of the license.

4. On the exceptions to copyright, it seems there's a pretty uncontroversial Wikimedian take on most of them. Specifically of interest I'd say would be the "Use of works for quotation and reporting current events", which is something that Wikinewsies (and people who write Wikipedia articles about current affairs) would find useful. And I'd say the public administration thing we should probably support too: it seems reasonable to think that Wikimedia might want to host rights-cleared work from the UK government that are under discussion in there.