Written evidence submitted by Julian Love

Summary

· The proposed changes to copyright legislation in the Hargreaves Review do not address several issues of great importance to the content creators that are the lifeblood of our creative industries:

· There is no penalty for stripping metadata from digital works, thus creating orphans. The majority of images and artworks distributed online therefore become orphaned.

· The proposed orphan works legislation allows commercial use of non-attributable works. This clearly creates a conflict of interest among publishing and distribution companies in creating and publishing orphan works.

· There is no automatic assignment of an artist’s moral rights to their work, yet this is the case in every other EU state and is recognized by the UN as a universal human right.

About Me

· I am a professional photographer specializing in travel and lifestyle imagery for the publishing and corporate marketplace. My work appears in magazines, books, and advertising for tour operators, hotels and tourist boards. I am a member of the Association of Photographers, the professional trade association for the industry.

Detailed Points:

1. No sanctions are proposed for the removal of digital copyright information from digital works. However, almost all websites and other forms of digital distribution automatically strip metadata from digital files, creating an orphan work in the process. Every day, millions of digital works are having their digital copyright information stripped rendering these works as orphans.

2. The review proposes allowing orphan works to be used for commercial purposes. However, as the point above demonstrates, many of the potential commercial users of orphan works are also involved in creating them. This creates a clear conflict of interest.

3. Asking commercial users of orphan works to pay into a central fund simply allows those users to relax the need to locate the owner of the orphan work. It is unrealistic for any creator to search a database for their images as there is no way of automating this process at present.

4. Professor Hargreaves said that copyright law should be evidence driven. Yet there is no proven need for orphan works to be commercially exploited and there is no published evidence that shows that UK industries are disadvantaged through being unable to commercially exploit orphan works.

5. There may be a case to permit orphan works to be used for cultural purposes, such as in libraries or museums, providing that a precise definition of cultural use can be defined and agreed.

6. Creators are not given a level playing field with industry. Industry at present can strip digital copyright data from creators work, not credit them, require creators to waive their moral rights or risk losing a contract, assign their copyright or lose a contract, all of which impose grossly unfair terms on the creator.