Future Legal Aspects of Long Term Preservation

Abstract

The article focuses on the clash of digital technologies and the copyright law from the recent perspective of long term preservation of culturally important works kept in the records of publicly available libraries. The author argues that although the national legislators in the European Union did a fine job easing the reproduction and providing access to these works the current stand of copyright law still creates a barrier to the fast improvement of this activity, which may result in a disadvantage compared to the United States of America. Therefore the paper analyses the most important elements of the recently published draft of the so-called Orphan Works directive.

Keywords: long term preservation, copyright, European Union, Orphan Works, Directive

JEL Classification: K11, K19, K33, K39, K40, K49