Please Sir, May I Reproduce It?

This Christmas, spare a thought for orphaned works. Even Santa cannot work out who owns them! But change may be on the way…

The Australian Government has released a draft bill that would allow certain uses of orphan works after a reasonable search for the copyright owner. Orphan works include all sorts of copyright material such as photos, artworks, writing, music and recordings where no creator or rights holder can be identified.

Why this matters

Schools, universities, libraries and collecting institutions have long struggled to use older or historical material when they cannot find the owner. Creators and filmmakers also hit roadblocks when trying to build on existing works. The new exception aims to make genuine orphan works available for teaching, preservation, research, exhibitions and some creative reuse, as long as people have genuinely tried to track down the rights holder.

Arts Law’s view

Arts Law supports fixing the orphan works problem where the creator truly cannot be found. We emphasise that artists rely on copyright for income, so any new system must let creators come forward later, claim their work and have a say over future use, including payment.

What about ICIP?

Indigenous Cultural and Intellectual Property is often owned collectively, which means some First Nations cultural material could be wrongly treated as orphaned. The Government has said that higher standards will apply to culturally sensitive material, but the draft bill does not clearly define this or mention ICIP. This is another reminder of why standalone ICIP legislation is urgently needed.

Artificial Intelligence Government Consultation

There is good news under the creative Christmas tree. The Australian Government has released its latest findings on AI and copyright, and has confirmed it will not introduce a broad data-mining exception. Data mining is complex to explain but in simple terms it refers to AI platforms grabbing content from websites to reproduce it. The outcome of this announcement is that AI developers will not be given a free pass to scrape creators’ work without permission. Consider it a small Christmas miracle for copyright, and one fewer cookie for the AI robots to help themselves to. We look forward to sharing our submission with you once it is published.

Arts Law is now preparing a submission to the consultation. Our priority is to make sure creators’ rights stay strong and are not chipped away as new AI rules are developed. We will share our full submission with the sector as soon as it is released.