AIPLA Comments Submitted Pursuant to Notice of Inquiry Regarding "Copyright Protection for Certain Visual Works,"

AIPLA believes the ease of unauthorized copying online is a major challenge to the licensing of visual works.

This is particularly true in light of the increasingly prevalent perception that visual works are and should be freely available, a shift which may be attributable to what has been described as a “participatory culture” or “sharing culture.”

Content providers seeking to satisfy the online community and an ever-shortening news cycle demand posting and sharing of content at an extremely fast pace, which has rendered more traditional licensing mechanisms in the online environment very difficult, if not obsolete. The large and growing number of orphan works and unauthorized mass digitization further hamper licensing efforts.

These issues were the subject of lengthy discussions and investigation by the Copyright Office, producing various Notices of Inquiry, in which AIPLA also filed comments, and culminating in the release by the Copyright Office in June 2015 of the Report on Orphan Works and Mass Digitization.

As AIPLA advocated in its earlier comments to those Notices, to address impediments to effective visual works licensing, we proposed that the Copyright Office provide, or at the very least endorse, a robust image search tool that would allow potential licensees to identify rights holders and make lawful use of content protected by copy.