A new paper in the CREATe Working Paper Series is now available: ‘I should like you to see them some time’: an empirical study of copyright clearance costs in the digitisation of Edwin Morgan’s scrapbooks by Victoria Stobo, Kerry Patterson, Kristofer Erickson and Ronan Deazley.
The inability of cultural institutions to make available digital reproductions of collected material highlights a shortcoming with the existing copyright framework in a number of national jurisdictions. Overlapping efforts to remedy the situation were recently undertaken in the form of EU Directive 2012/28/EU, the ‘Orphan Works’ directive, and a new licensing scheme introduced by the UK Intellectual Property Office (UKIPO). This study empirically evaluates both the EU and UK policy approaches, drawing on data collected during a live rights clearance simulation.
The authors attempted to clear rights in a sample of 432 items contained in the mixed-media Edwin Morgan Scrapbooks collection held by the University of Glasgow Library. Data were collected on the resource costs incurred at each stage of the rights clearance process, from initial audit of the collection, through to compliance with diligent search requirements under EU Directive 2012/28/EU and the UKIPO licensing procedures.
The full abstract and downloadable paper can be accessed from here: ‘I should like you to see them some time’: an empirical study of copyright clearance costs in the digitisation of Edwin Morgan’s scrapbooks.