Copyright – the opportunity that won’t go away
Jinfo Blog

29th July 2010

By Tim Buckley Owen

Item

Serious flaws in the way copyright and content licensing operate have been highlighted recently in two super-authoritative reports. They’re important in themselves – but they also represent an opportunity for information professionals prepared to take the leap. First comes a hefty document commissioned by the Strategic Advisory Board for Intellectual Property Policy (SABIP), which provides independent evidence-based advice to the United Kingdom government. Entitled The Relationship Between Copyright and Contract Law, it identifies four areas that need urgent investigation. More work needs to be done on the empirical effects of intellectual property regulations, it advises, and on the conflict between competition law and copyright law – and it’s also unhappy about the narrow mandate of the UK Copyright Tribunal. But the most pressing issues stem from the creation of new digital services where, as the report says, private ordering is running well ahead of policy (download the report at http://digbig.com/5bccdn or there’s a handy summary from Out-Law at http://digbig.com/5bccdp). Next comes the British Library with the uncompromisingly titled Driving UK Research: Is Copyright a Help or a Hindrance? Bringing together the views of a number of researchers, it too emphasises how the framework for intellectual property needs revising for the digital age. Contributors call for UK fair dealing provisions to be brought into line with the United States fair use doctrine, and for ‘orphan works’ to be placed in the public domain. Exceptions to copyright law shouldn’t be overridden by contract or technical protection measures, they say – and they expose some of the barriers that the existing copyright regime throws up against text mining and data indexing (download the report via http://digbig.com/5bccdq). If this all sounds a bit academic, the consequences can be very practical indeed. Investment banker Goldman Sachs (http://www.vivavip.com/go/e29250) and private equity firm Blackstone (http://www.vivavip.com/go/e18994) are two high profile organisations that have been in trouble recently over their alleged use of intellectual property owners’ content. It’s probably fair to say that information managers haven’t always been seen as the answer to corporate copyright issues. FreePint’s Copyright Policies and Practices report earlier this year found that only 59% of end users would turn to information professionals for copyright education and training (report outline at http://web.freepint.com/go/about/press/4551, purchase details at http://web.freepint.com/go/shop/report/1624/). But that could be about to change. Information professionals have long numbered copyright compliance among their manifold roles – but recently recruitment consultancy Sue Hill (http://www.suehill.com) has been advertising a vacancy for a dedicated part time Copyright & Licensing Officer (also listed in FreePint’s Jinfo service – http://digbig.com/5bccdr). The successful candidate will become the client organisation’s ‘expert’ on copyright and rights management issues, the announcement said, and will – ideally – be a qualified information professional with library experience. Where this opportunity arises, could others follow?

« Blog