The Orphan Works Puzzle

Orphan Works, defined as any original work of authorship for which a good faith prospective user cannot readily identify and/or locate the copyright owners, is a massive and pervasive problem across the U.S.  For example, approximately 2.5 to 5 million books out of the 40 million books in U.S. libraries are currently orphans.  For photographs and other art works, the numbers are even higher.

While the U.S. Copyright office has, along with Congress, proposed a number of solutions and laws to remedy the situation, none have passed in a decade, and the problem remains. Join Kyle Courtney, Copyright Advisor at Harvard University, to discuss most recent federal efforts to deal with the orphan works problem, and explore the new legal theories that are being developed by Kyle and his team to solve the orphan works puzzle. 

Refreshments will be served.

This event is free, but please register!

Kyle K. Courtney is Copyright Advisor at Harvard University working out of the Office for Scholarly Communication.  He works closely with the Harvard community to establish a culture of shared understanding of copyright issues among Harvard staff, faculty, and students. He continues to teach first year legal research sessions as part of Harvard Law School’s Legal Research & Writing Program. His work at Harvard also includes a role as the copyright and information policy advisor for Harvard’s online MOOC classes with edX, and founding the Harvard Copyright First Responders program.

Previously, Kyle was Manager of Faculty Research and Scholarship at Harvard Law School.  He also maintains a dual appointment at Northeastern University teaching Cyberlaw: Privacy, Ethics, and Digital Rights for the interdisciplinary Information Assurance program at the College of Computer Science.  Kyle holds a J.D. with distinction in Intellectual Property Law and an MSLIS.  He is a published author and nationally recognized speaker on the topic of copyright, technology, libraries, and the law. Kyle’s most recently book is titled MOOCs and Libraries, published by Rowman & Littlefield, Ltd.  

His blog is at www.kylecourtney.com and he can be found on Twitter @KyleKCourtney.