The Gowers Review of Intellectual Property (IP), commissioned by Gordon Brown and widely anticipated to be the most significant influence on UK copyright legislation since the 1988 Act, appears to offer little immediate help for individual creators such as photographers. Many organisations, including Redeye, had lobbied for practical help for photographers faced with issues such as copyright 'grabs' (mandatory copyright assignment) by large companies and increasing copyright theft. There was disappointment that these issues have not been addressed.
According to Gordon Brown, as a result of the review the government now intends to 'tighten the penalties for copying and piracy while giving individuals new rights for personal use; [and] introduce a new fast track protection for small companies to safeguard their trademarks.' But the bulk of the report is concerned with music, patents and new media issues such as peer-to-peer downloading and sampling.
The full report, published on 6th December, can be downloaded from HM Treasury's website. Significant recommendations from the review are as follows:
Orphan Works
Recommendation 13 proposes 'a provision for orphan works to the European Commission'. Orphan works are works whose copyright holder cannot be identified. The proposal will mean lifting legal restrictions on the free use of such works. This is potentially very damaging for photographers, especially those whose works are routinely uncredited or circulated without copyright information. It's also potentially lucrative for those who hold others' images that lack copyright details. The Review does not propose a corresponding legal right to attribution, which might have been sensible, although it does propose a voluntary register of copyright holders to be kept at the Patent Office (to be renamed the Intellectual Property Office). In the meantime Redeye strongly recommends that all photographers label or mark all their images!
Transformative Use
Recommendation 11 proposes creating a copyright exception for certain transformative or derivative works. This is really aimed at musicians who sample other songs to create new ones, but it might well be applied to the use of photographic and other works, making it easier for others to exploit your work in certain ways.
Tightened legislation
New powers for the police and Trading Standards to act on copyright crime (recommendations 41 and 42) seem on the face of it to help photographers; however the Review makes it clear these powers are aimed at 'organised crime' - whether such a definition could be applied to large companies is uncertain. The fast tracking of IP cases (recommendation 54) might be useful - if your case involves a claim over £15,000.
Better public and business awareness of IP and licensing
Potentially this is the most helpful thing for photographers; both a proposed raising of the public profile of IP (recommendation 35) and more particularly the creation of 'Business-to-business model IP licences' (Recommendation 29), that will make it more difficult for small businesses to claim ignorance of copyright licensing, the freelance photographer's best friend.
Director of Redeye, photographer Paul Herrmann, commented 'The Gowers Review makes clearer than ever the significance of what we create and the importance of creativity, including photography, to the economy. It also underlines that we can't take copyright for granted; photographers need to be businesslike in the way we protect and licence our work if we don't want to lose control of it. I'm pleased that the Review wants to raise public and business awareness of copyright and licensing, and Redeye welcomes the call for model IP licences. But it's disappointing that the struggle of working photographers against copyright grabs and theft was not given more support.'
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