At the end of May, Eye would traditionally have been the scene of the Eye International Conference, this year hosting the 12th Orphan Film Symposium dedicated to the theme “Water, Climate, and Migration”. Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, the symposium had to transform into a completely virtual event.
Orphans & Eye The Orphan Film Symposium is a renowned bi-annual gathering that has been celebrating abandoned and forgotten films since 1999. Since its first edition, the Filmmuseum has contributed to Orphans. Eye and New York University planned for nearly two years to have the symposium convene again in conjunction with the Eye International Conference. After a successful first European edition in Eye in 2014, with over 200 international guests from thirty countries, Eye was looking forward to welcoming again this wonderful community of international cinephiles.
9 November 2016 – In 2012, the Orphan Works Directive has been adopted with the aim to unlock hundreds of thousands of objects preserved in Europe’s libraries, museums, archives and cinematheques, to digitse and publish them on portals like the European Film Gateway or Europeana. How has this objective been put into practise? The conference, jointly organised by FORWARD coordinator CINEMATEK and the Royal Library of Belgium, brings together professionals from the library and the audiovisual sector, policy makers and Commission’s representatives to discuss the impact of the Directive and how it has been transposed into national law.
In the afternoon, participants are invited to discover new orphan works tools: the FORWARD system to support the rights status assessment of audiovisual works, and the Royal Library’s orphan works database.
Venue: Royal Library of Belgium Date: 30th of November 2016, 9.30 – 16.30 h
You can access the programme and the registration form on the FORWARD website: http://tinyurl.com/z7oavr6 Registration is free of charge, but upon inscription. Please register before 25th of November.
Since November 2013, a consortium of 13 partners, among them 11 Film Heritage Institutions and commercial film libraries are working on FORWARD, a three-year EU funded project, which aims at creating an EU wide, semi-automated system to assess the rights status for all types of audiovisual works, including orphans. FORWARD has been initiated by ACE in the context of the Orphan Works Directive 2012/28/EU. It is, in a way, the result of ACE’s advocacy work to facilitate rights clearing for films and, in particular, to find a solution for the hundreds of thousand of orphan works preserved in Europe’s film archives. FORWARD also works towards the Commission’s policy for an integrated approach to Europe’s cultural heritage.
FORWARD is co-ordinated by the Cinémathèque Royale de Belgique and supported by the Community Porgramme CIP ICT PSP “Europeana & Creativity”.
Work programme:
Analysis of national copyright legislationsand system workflow
As a first step, the legal frameworks of the countries involved in the project have been analysed. This is a necessary step to define the workflow for assessing the rights status of a film and to get a clear indication whether it is in public domain or in-copyright, and in this case, whether it is orphan and how it can be used across Europe. So far, FORWARD started to define legal decision trees for those countries in the project that have already implemented the EU Orphan Works Directive: Finland and Germany. The Netherlands and Denmark will follow. The analysis of the legal frameworks is coordinated by EYE Film Institute, due to their legal expertise in the “Images for the FUTURE” project and the European Film Gateway.
Design of rights information infrastructure The workflow design from a technical point of view is coordinated by CINECA. CINECA builds on the experience they have achieved as a technical partner in ARROW. ARROW is a similar tool to assist rights clearance, but for the publishing sector. Compared to ARROW, the system’s workflow in FORWARD is much more complex, because a film has more authors: In most European countries these are the principal director, music composer, author of the screenplay and author of dialogues. This means that much more databases and sources need to be checked to find the relevant information.
How to find information about AV rights holders? The 10 Film Heritage Institutions (FHI) presented in the consortium are the main and often unique sources of information, which is stored in filmographic databases, catalogues, on cencorship cards etc. However, to complete the information, 3rd party databases from producers, authors, and Collective Management Societies need to be searched as well. FORWARD partners are currently identifying relevant national 3rd party information sources such as GEMMA for music rights. FORWARD will take into consideration the search criteria and sources which need to be queried in compliance with the national legislations on Orphan Works
Enriching metada Project partner DFI (Danish Film Institute) is currently analyzing the databases of each partner archive. If information is missing that is critical for assessing the rights status, the archive will record the information manually, so that it can be harvested and processed by the FORWARD system.
Promotion and consensus building Consensus building among all stakeholders is a key element for the progress and succes of the project. FHI, CMOs, producers etc need to agree upon the workflow. For this purpose national seminars will be organized in the partner’s countries. The first seminars will be held in October in Germany at the Deutsches Filminstitut, Finland and The Netherlands are following.
Partners: Cinémathèque Royale de Belgique/Koninklijk Belgisch Filmarchief, coordinator (Brussels), Association des Cinémathèques Européennes (Brussels, Frankfurt), CNC – Archives françaises du film (Bois d´Arcy), Consorzio Interuniversitario – CINECA (Bologna), Danish Film Institute (Copenhagen), Deutsches Filminstitut – DIF (Frankfurt), EYE Film Institute Netherlands (Amsterdam), Fondazione Cineteca di Bologna (Bologna), FOCAL International LTD (Middlesex), Filmoteka Narodowa (Warsaw), KAVI – National Audiovisual Insitute (Helsinki), Instituto de la Cinematografia y Artes Audiovisuales – Filmoteca Española (Madrid), Národní filmový archiv – National Film Archive (Prague).
13/02/2014 – From 30 March to 2 April, EYE Film Institute Netherlands is hosting the 9th edition of the Orphan Film Symposium. The event is organised in cooperation with NYU Cinema Studies and the University of Amsterdam. For the first time, it will be held in Europe. Theme of Orphans 9 is “The Future of Obsolescence”: What kind of orphan films document these phenomena? What neglected and orphaned media should we re-view to better understand the world? How should archivists and curators deal with obsolete “new media”? How do archives, museums, libraries, and sister institutions participate in remix culture? The symposium addresses archivists, curators, scholars, technology experts, librarians, collectors, distributors, preservationists, artists, and legal experts alike. It starts on Sunday evening, March 30, 2014, with a film concert and the world premiere of the recent EYE discovery and preservation of East is West (USA, 1922). One session will be dedicated to the FORWARD project, the European Registry for Orphan Works.
Attendance at the Orphan Film Symposium is open to anyone, but advanced paid registration is required. Registration fee is $250 before 15 February, $300 after. Students and the underemployed may pay half-price. The fees cover access to screenings, panels, performances, and events, catered meals and breaks and a registration packet.
30 May 2013 – Large scale digitsation projects, mainly undertaken by libraries and archives, are absolutely indispensable for the promotion of the knowledge society and public access to culture. These projects are all confronted with the challenge of copyright. To date, European Institutions don’t have a specific solution for mass-digitisation.
Over the past two years, three European initiatives have been set up in order to facilitate (large scale) digitisation and the access to works which are still in copyright: The Directive 2012/28/EU on Orphan Works, the Memorandum of Understanding on Works out-of-Commerce between libraires, publishers and collecting societies (2011), and the structured Stakeholder Dialogue “Licences for Europe”, a joint initiative launched by the Commisioners Barnier, Kroes and Vassiliou in February 2013.
Aim of the conference organised by CRIDS – Centre de Recherche sur Information, Droit et Société (Université de Namur) is to envisage the impact of these initiatives on the digitisation process and the availibility of works online. Nicola Mazzanti, ACE president and director of the Cinémathèque royale de Belgique, will speek about the necessity of digitisation in the audiovisuel sector.
11 March 2013 – The digital revolution and the birth of Web 2.0 has fundamentally transformed the media landscape. As a consequence, the question of intellectual copyright is at the very center of the public debate and has also begun to draw the attention of scholars and researcher.
The conference “Who’s What? Intellectual Copyright in the Digital Era” will discuss different aspects of this transformation. One section is dedicated to “Property and the Archives”. Nicola Mazzanti (Cinémathèque royale de Belgique, ACE president) and Leontine Bout (EYE Film Institute Netherlands) will present the film archives perspective and speak about the impact of current copyright legislation on their daily work. A round table coordinated by the Association des Cinémathèques Europénnes will look into chances and limitations for using orphan films in view of the European Directive on orphan works.
The Udine conference is part of filmforum, an international festival devoted to cinema and the contemporary visual arts. It brings together scientific research, the dissemination of culture, and exhibition shows. FilmForum takes place in Udine and Gorizia and it offers conferences, meetings, workshops and screenings. It also hosts the Limina Award for Italian and international books on film. The festival addresses a wide-ranging audience which includes specialists, scholars and students in audiovisual and new media studies as well as fans of cinema and visual culture.
3 September 2012 – This year’s Cinema Expert Group – Subgroup Film Heritage takes place at the Cinematek in Brussels on 16 October 2012. The Cinema Experts Group is annually organised by the Audiovisual and Media Policy Unit of the European Commission, where experts from all over Europe meet to discuss best practices and policies related to film heritage. Attendance to the meeting is by invitation only. Agenda updates and related documents are available on http://ec.europa.eu/avpolicy/reg/cinema/experts/index_en.htm
27 May 2011 – On 24 May 2011, the European Commission adopted a Proposal for a Directive on certain permitted uses of orphan works with a view to establishing common rules on the digitisation and online display of so-called orphan works. Orphan works are works like books, published articles and films that are still protected by copyright but whose authors are not known or cannot be located or contacted to obtain copyright permissions.
According to a study ACE carried out among its member archives in 2009, about 21% of the films held in Europe’s film archives and cinematheques are estimated to be orphan works. But with no common rules available to make the digitisation and online display of orphan works legally possible, they are doomed to remain untouched and therefore inaccessible. In order to proceed with large-scale digitisation projects such as the Europeana portal, common guidelines on how to deal with such works are necessary.
The Proposal forsees a new EU law providing lawful, cross-border online access to orphan works. Libraries, museums and archives in the EU country where a work was first published would be required to conduct a thorough search to find the copyright holder before creating a digital version. If the rightholder cannot be identified or located, the work would be identified as an “orphan” and that status would apply throughout the EU so that the work could be made available online without prior authorisation until the owner is identified and found.
13 May 2011 – On 30 and 31 May, EFG – The European Film Gateway will hold the open conference “Taking Care Of Orphan Works – Rights Clearance in European Film Archives”. Representatives from film archives, Europeana and rights holder organisations will meet at EYE Film Institute Netherlands, Amsterdam, to talk about rights clearing and the unsolved question of how to deal with orphan works in Europe’s film archives.
The keynote speech will be given by Elisabeth Niggemann, Member of the Comité des Sages on Digitisation and Director General of the German National Library.
The conference is jointly organised by EFG partners EYE Film Institute Netherlands, leader of the EFG Work Package “IPR Management and Administration” and ACE, initiator of EFG and one of the leading protagonists in the orphan works debate.
Attendance to the conference is free of charge, however, the amount of seats is limited.
For further information and to register, please visit www.efgproject.eu.
Orphans & Eye
