“The Act contains changes to UK copyright law which permit the commercial exploitation of images where information identifying the owner is missing, so-called “orphan works”, by placing the work into what’s known as “extended collective licensing” schemes. Since most digital images on the internet today are orphans – the metadata is missing or has been stripped by a large organisation – millions of photographs and illustrations are swept into such schemes.”
There have been a number of scares about this over the past few years in the U.S. They were scary and raised red flags and were beat down repeatedly, but ultimately, if I recall, upon further inspection, weren’t as bad as they were thought to be upon further examination of what the bills actually entailed. I haven’t looked too much more into this new one myself, but I’m under the impression that this is a bit more severe than the previous propositions in America, and I would advise people to be a bit more careful about signing their online work in the future. I know I will be.
I checked this out, and JFC it is actually real. http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-22337406 I’ll be following this closely for more concrete information.
UK Passes ‘Orphan Works’ Act; All your stuff are belong to everyone
Lady Karasu 