Home » The Enterprise and Regulatory Reform Act – What you should know

The Enterprise and Regulatory Reform Act – What you should know

By Amanda
Think you own your own artwork/illustrations or pictures? Think again. What was your property by default will only remain yours if you take steps to protect it. 
The Enterprise and Regulatory Reform Act was passed by Parliament last week. I usually pride myself on keeping up to date on current affairs, but somehow this slid under my radar. While the act is quite broad in scope – the part that affects most of us are the changes in copyrighted images. 
According to the government, the act will: 
modernise the UK’s copyright regime to promote innovation in the design industry, encouraging investment in new products while strengthening copyright protections. Creating a level playing field for collecting societies and the thousands of small businesses and organisations who deal with them by strengthening the existing regulatory regime. For the first time orphan works will be licensed for use; these are copyrighted works for which the owner of the copyright is unknown or can’t be found.” 
 
At face value, the act seeks to protect users of orphan works, such as libraries and archives that want to display works whose copyrights are unknown by placing the works into an extended collective licensing system. This sounds fair enough until you realise that we’re not just talking about old media that has been around for many years. Almost all images now published online are orphan works; as often the metadata is stripped off as soon as the image is published, leaving no record of the owner/creator. 
 
The act then, basically allows commercial exploitation of any unidentified work. The potential users of orphan works need only perform a ‘diligent search’ for the owner, which will be almost impossible to track down in the majority of cases. Your photos could potentially belong to a complete stranger – and not only that, but they could make a profit from them. 
 
How can we protect ourselves? 
 
According to photo rights campaigner Paul Ellis, UK residents will have no choice but to register each image using the PLUS registry, or remove the images from the internet if they want to be completely protected. 
Alternatively, and not as drastically, adding a watermark makes it more difficult for someone to use your images and can be easily done with software such as Lightroom. 
 
In the meantime, keep your eyes on your images. There’s a good chance if you’re not, someone else is. 

For more information, and to read the complete act, click the following link:
https://www.gov.uk/government/news/enterprise-and-regulatory-reform-bill-receives-royal-assent

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