UK's Copyright Hub: a license to create

• Author: Richard Hooper, Chairman
• Position: The Copyright Hub Foundation, London, United Kingdom

This was the case in the UK, but five years ago I was asked by the British Government to implement a recommendation emerging from Professor Ian Hargreaves’ major review of copyright. It concerned the implementation of a digital copyright exchange (DCE), to make copyright licensing easier. The DCE, which is now called the Copyright Hub, is guided and governed by the London-based non-profit Copyright Hub Foundation, of which I am the Chairman. The first “proof of concept” phase has been implemented, with funding from the creative industries in the UK, Australia and the US and the tech company Google, alongside funding from the British Government.

Secondary/permissions licensing

The Copyright Hub is currently focusing on what is called secondary or permissions licensing, for example when I want to put a certain piece of music on my daughter’s wedding video or when I want to use that image on this website. This is not about primary licensing – a writer licensing a publisher to publish her next novel. Nor is it about consumer licensing – the first screen on the DVD which tells consumers what they are not allowed to do with the DVD, for example charge entrance fees. It is about legal and correct reuse of copyright works to create new copyright works.

The back story

In 2012, Dr Ros Lynch - the British civil servant who was assigned to help implement the Hargreaves recommendation - and I produced a diagnostic report. Our aim was to ensure we had a clear understanding of the problems associated with copyright licensing and how these could be addressed by a DCE. While the report identified a wide range of problems in the analog and digital space, two main issues stood out: poor data and poor treatment of licensees.

In the analog world users and creators were two different species. In the digital world those species have blended – users are creators and creators are users.

The data used by the creative industries to track works and their creators or rights owners were poor. This might not pose a problem in an analog world of small numbers of high-value licensing transactions with high transaction costs. But poor data are a problem for the high volume of lower-value transactions that are occurring in the digital world. Why? Because creators are not always getting paid properly. And a third of users, as later research quantified, wishing to reuse copyright content cannot find the rights owner so they either do not reuse the work or they pirate it. Both...