My Lords, I shall speak against Amendment 84AA and the other amendments in the group. I refer back to the point made by my noble friend Lord Clement-Jones about the scope and size of the problem of unpublished works and grey literature. A study by the British Library found that 43% of potentially in-copyright works published between 1870 and 2010 were orphan works. The figure for unpublished works, including letters, diaries, photographs and memos is far higher, and grey literature produced by charities, societies and associations but not for any direct commercial purpose, also contain high concentrations of orphan works. One example of that is a study of sound recordings of political debates in the 1960s, which identified 350 performers, of whom only 100 could be traced, meaning that more than 70% of the content was orphaned; 350 hours were spent trying to clear the rights to use the material; and the success rate—permissions received—was only 4%. That shows us the size of the problem, which is why I am grateful to the Government for the clarifications in the Bill and why we need to oppose the amendments.
Bringing copyright for unpublished work into line with the existing copyright duration would release much valuable historical data into the public domain and would not affect unpublished works created shortly before the 1988 transitional arrangements. As we have discussed in previous stages of this Bill, works of these kinds are, of their nature, orphan works. The copyright holders are incredibly difficult to identify. The British Library notes that it still has material from the 7th century in copyright. As a result, a large amount of material currently in copyright due to the transitional arrangements would be difficult or impossible ever to obtain a licence for.