UK announces updates to Copyright Licensing

July 3, 2012

3 July 2012. The United Kingdom government will publish draft updates to the UK copyright licensing system later this week, keeping strong criminal penalties, it said today.

The new legislative measures will be included in the Enterprise and Regulatory Reform bill to be published later in the week. According to the Department of Business, Innovation and Skills (which the IP office is in), they would:

“•    allow the creation of a future ‘orphan works’ scheme to open access to valuable material that currently can’t be licensed or used
•    put in place a voluntary regime for extending collective licensing to help reduce complexities in the system
•    reserve a power to introduce statutory codes of conduct for collecting societies if they fail to operate to minimum standards.”

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