Have you considered embracing the change you have noticed and actually switching to the Pirate Party?

Unfortunately the Digital Economy Bill does not adequately address the problem. The bill provides for licensing of an orphan work (the approach which has been taken by Canada). This simply doesn’t work: since 1990 the Copyright Board of Canada has granted permission for the use of 237 works, these include “the reproduction of Châtelaine magazine covers in a promotional calendar”, “the reproduction of two nursery rhymes in an educational textbook” and “the reproduction of six images of aliens (source unknown)”. This is hardly unlocking the lost works of Canadian culture. (See http://www.cb-cda.gc.ca/unlocatable-introuvables/licences-e.html )

The trouble with the proposed approach is that it simply does not address the problem. It doesn’t help identify copyright owners. It doesn’t allow mass digitization for indexing purposes. It prejudices the legitimate rights of the copyright holder. It doesn’t address the fact that there are vast quantities of orphaned works.

The bill fails to understand a fundamental point: there is the public interest case for making orphan works more easily accessible and there is the copyright holder’s interest in being reunited with their works, and those two interests are rarely in conflict.

We need to adopt the approach being proposed in the US. There, provided a user makes a documented, good faith, diligent but unsuccessful search for the copyright holder, the user is free to use the work. (Of course the terms ‘diligent’ etc need to be defined, but that is a matter of legal detail.) The user is indemnified against prosecution. If the copyright holder resurfaces then they are entitled to a reasonable compensation for use of their work (again the precise legal meaning of ’reasonable compensation’ needs to be defined – the US report goes into this in some detail).

Everyone wins. Our cultural heritage is unlocked, and copyright holders can get compensation for their works.

We need a digital archive of our culture that is available to historians, researchers and people who are simply curious. We need a means of republishing orphan works. We need to unlock our lost culture. Let’s not enact legislation that prevents all that.

I have written about this more extensively at:
http://martinbudden.wordpress.com/2009/09/09/digital-britain-report-and-orphan-works/

see the collection at http://www.library.illinois.edu/gaming/index.html for instance

one of the most evocative exhibits in the british library is the collection of original beatles lyrics on random scraps of paper and school exercise books. at the time this would have been ridiculed by the cultural establishment as a collection of games might be now.

let’s preserve Frak!, Uridium, Head over Heels etc