The proposal does not permit commercial exploitations of the unidentified works, except by museums, archives and libraries and only to fund specific digitisation programmes.
It’s a live issue because of the potential impact on jobs. The emotive term ‘orphan work’ is quite misleading: any work for which an author can’t readily be identified – and that includes almost all photographs and illustrations bobbing about on the web – is an ‘orphan’ work, so the threat to the livelihoods of snappers and illustrators from poorly worded or malicious legislation is very real.
More:
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2012/09/14/eu_orphan_works/
