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Today the European Parliament passed with an overwhelming majority – 531 voting in favor, 11 against and 65 abstentions – a compromise proposal for a directive on certain permitted uses of orphan works. In Europe, orphan works are a much greater problem than, for example, in the USA, because European copyright has for a much longer time featured automatic protection. As a consequence, finding rights holders is more difficult than in the USA, where works had to be registered until the end of the 1980s. And due to ever-longer protection terms, the number of orphan works is going to increase even further every year, making access to our common cultural heritage increasingly difficult.
The so-called orphan works directive addresses the problem by allowing public-sector institutions such as libraries, museums, archives, educational establishments and film heritage institutions to digitize and publicize orphan works after conducting a “diligent search”. What constitutes a “diligant search” is outlined in more detail in a “Memorandum of Understanding on Diligent Search Guidelines for Orphan Works”.
CRESC, the Centre for Research on Socio-Cultural Change, is a well-known institution for many working on finance in sociology and political science, as well as researchers in cultural and media politics. By uniquely bringing together researchers from these fields, its annual conference in Manchester is an inspirational forum for unorthodox interdisciplinary exchange, without the numbing genericity of academic mega-conferences.
The theme chosen for this year’s conference (5-7 September) proved an excellent basis for taking stock of economies and societies in crisis: “Promises“. One striking feature of this conference was the presence of journalists, NGO representatives, and professionals like asset managers (as spectators and presenters) alongside academics, which added diverse perspectives and precluded overly technical/theoretical debates. (Other conferences may follow this good example.) Being spoiled for choice among the many panels, I mostly attended the ones on finance, missing the more culture-heavy sessions. Therefore, the three observations which impressed themselves upon me relate to the more political-economic questions in coming to grips with the present state of capitalism. Three insights from Manchester:
1. Financialisation is so pervasive and wide, many facets are only now being explored. Read the rest of this entry »
More than three years after I posted ‘Fair value accounting in retreat?’ on this blog, it seems appropriate to take stock of the results of reform initiatives undertaken after the financial crisis. Just as a brief reminder: In the course of the financial crisis, International Financial Reporting Standards were suspected to have exacerbated the collapse of financial markets. Particularly the use of “fair value accounting” for banks’ financial assets was scrutinized for its contribution to downwards spirals between devaluated market assets and banks’ rising capital requirements. Previously considered as a purely technical matter, accounting principles suddenly became a matter of international politics. The G20, the Financial Stability Board, IOSCO and the two leading standard setters, IASB and the US-American FASB, all got involved in what appeared a busy beehive of reform debates. Three-and-a-half years later, with the financial crisis followed and superseded by the European sovereign debt crisis, accounting principles seem to have returned to their status of “sleeping beauty”. Yet, this impression is misleading. Accounting principles continue to be a crucial link between the reporting of financial institutions and financial market regulation. All the more a reason for reviewing two recent publications which analyse international accounting standards reform and harmonisation.
governancexborders.com 