Tuesday 9 June 2009

The Crown and the orphans

Two new reports explore the barriers created by Crown copyright and orphan works. Is the Queen too remote? Are the orphans being shunned?

OPSI has carried out a survey to find out whether the public feel it's difficult to re-use Crown copyright material. It established that there would be little point in aligning it with Creative Commons as awareness and understanding of CC is low (so this symbol, right, got the thumbs down – phew!). A non-transactional process was perceived to be more encouraging and easier to understand than existing processes.

In from the Cold, a report by the Strategic Content Alliance and The Collections Trust, estimates that over 50 million items such as photographs, recordings, texts and other ephemera from the last 100 years risk becoming invisible because they are excluded from digitisation projects due to the complexity and time required to trace ownership.

2 comments:

goldenrail said...

Is awareness and understanding of CC any lower than awareness and understanding of copyright in general amongst the regular population?

Hugo said...

The OPSI survey addressed this very question. People think they understand copyright, even if they don't, but 87% of general public respondents didn't even recognize the Creative Commons symbol that appears on the bottom right of this web page.