A Single-Minded Market for Digital Assets? : Copyright clearance of orphan works in the digitisation ecosystem

Abstract: 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).