An online copyright shop - too good to be true?
Jinfo Blog

By Penny Crossland

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Information professionals know that copyright law is a minefield, especially when dealing with digital access to material. What’s more, researchers have been voicing for a while that the existing UK copyright law is not fit for purpose in the digital age. As reported by Tim Buckley Owen 18 months ago, the British Library questioned in a report whether copyright law was acting as a hindrance to the UK’s research efforts and thereby impacting negatively on the UK economy. Academics, too have argued that intellectual law needs to be changed to fit the digital era.

However, despite calls from all sides for copyright law to be brought into the 21st century, the wheels that affect change move very slowly. The UK Government published an interim report on Digital Britain almost three years ago – see Diana Nutting’s report here – which recognised the need for a new copyright law to reflect the new knowledge economy.

Then in May this year, the Department for Business, Innovation & Skills published a report entitled Digital Opportunity which amongst other recommendations called for a digital copyright exchange (DCE). Hailed as a world first, and as a vehicle to “unlock significant growth potential in the creative sector”, it was proposed that this exchange would act as an online copyright shop where “licences in copyright content can be readily bought and sold”.

The idea was to let rights holders determine how others can access their works and let consumers identify the owners of licences quickly. Other recommendations included a change in the law that allows consumers to access orphan works and changes to what is lawful to copy. The author of the report, Professor Ian Hargreaves estimated that all these changes could boost the UK economy to the tune of £7.9 billion.

This is no small fry in straitened times and it is not surprising that all the report’s recommendations were backed by the Government. Two weeks ago, a feasibility study was launched to look into how such an exchange may be implemented.

As reported by Out-Law.com, the next step is to collect the views of all stakeholders in the copyright sector as to how to implement such an exchange. The aim is to complete the study by the summer of 2012, where after it will make its way into the statute books.

However, inevitably there are industry sceptics as to the success of a DCE. Music website CMU believes that although the idea is a good one, it is unlikely to see the light of day, while the National Union of Journalists thinks a copyright exchange “would invite many kinds of abuses".

The bottom line is of course how such an exchange will be paid for and as Iain Connor of law firm Pinsent Masons pointed out, this is an issue that the Government should  sort out before attempting to gain support from stakeholders.

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