As the first collaboration of its kind, in February 2016, IP Osgoode and The Copyright and International Trade Policy Branch of the Department of Canadian Heritage, came together to organize the “Orphan Works Licensing Portal Hackathon”, a multi-day hackathon to develop options for a new online system to process licensing of Canadian orphan works through collaborative engagement of experts and stakeholders.

The Hackathon, a unique workshop-type event, using a mixture of user-centered design and agile start-up methodology, allowed the full range of participants (students, engineers, policy analysts, collective society members, industry experts, librarians, archivists) from Canada and abroad to work in teams to identify opportunities, design new prototypes to improve the Canadian Orphan Works system. Significantly, the participants pitched the resulting prototypes and tested these for evaluation by subject-matter experts.

The hackathon produced and vetted many new ideas within the three days, and some of the more successful concepts were built into initial demos with the potential to be flushed out in full by ongoing projects. Thanks to IP Osgoode’s collaboration with BEST (Bergeron Entrepreneurs in Science & Technology) at the Lassonde School of Engineering, which ultimately awarded as prizes, time and expertise in their labs to further develop the prototypes, these projects have the serious ability of being adopted and making a difference in the orphan works system. In addition to the concepts and demos, the hackathon also produced some key insights and directions for future work in improving intellectual property policy generally, and specifically that around orphan works and the copyright regime. Rather than the usual “conferencing of ideas”, the hands-on approach of the hackathon served as a quick and agile way to surface many concerns, new ideas, and key points for intervention and opportunities. Ultimately, the idea of employing the concept of a hackathon to work constructively towards solutions, came from IP Osgoode’s Founder and Director, Professor D’Agostino’s sabbatical time in Stanford, and animated by her SSHRC grant work entitled “Triggering Innovation: Transnational Partnership for the Mobilization of IP Policy and Practices” (SSHRC Partnership Development Grant, Grant No. 890-2011-0097). With already a successful hackathon organized the previous academic year in partnership with the Canadian Intellectual Property Office and the Lassonde School of Engineering, on making the patent system more user-friendly, the concept of hackathons are no doubt a useful practical and policy tool to resolve many of Canada’s IP challenges.

This report presents the process that the hackathon used, the work product that was created during the design process, and the concepts and insights that emerged out of the hackathon.

Featured here is the Introduction section of the report entitled "IP Osgoode Orphan Works Hackathon: Final Report of the Concepts, Process and Insights" by Professor Giuseppina D'Agostino and Margaret Hagan, the Design Hosts for the Orphan Works Licensing Portal Hackathon, which took place on February 3-5, 2016 at Osgoode Hall Law School.  The .

Giuseppina D’Agostino is the Founder & Director of IP Osgoode, the IP Intensive Program, and the Innovation Clinic, the Editor-in-Chief for the IPilogue and the Intellectual Property Journal, and an Associate Professor at Osgoode Hall Law School.

Margaret Hagan is a fellow at Stanford Law’s Center on the Legal Profession and a lecturer at .

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For the uninitiated: a hackathon is an event where designers, developers, and industry stakeholders form teams and work together to prototype solutions to a specific common problem. Hackathons are competitive, and teams must pitch their prototype to a panel of judges. Participants of the orphan works hackathon gave updates during the day using the hashtag.

For this event, IPOsgoode brought together minds from across the creative community, law, engineering, and academia to design solutions to the orphan works issue. Orphan works are those works protected by copyright but whose rights-holder is unidentifiable, or cannot be located and contacted. Many creators--including authors, historians and documentarians--face challenges to use orphan works in their own creations. This challenge represents a market failure, since creators are willing to secure licences for the works but do not or cannot because the expense of identifying and/or finding the authors is too high. This leaves many unique and valuable works out of historical works or other downstream creative works that might re-use them.

Canada currently has a supplemental licensing regime for orphan works under . However, this scheme does little to assist the due-diligence challenge faced by creators when attempting to use orphan works. To earn a licence, a due-diligence search must be conducted; but, it may be a futile and fruitless search for something non-existent. Furthermore, many Canadian archives do not have digitized collections and due-diligence searches must be conducted by hand, or using a network of personal connections.  Orphan works was an ideal hackathon problem, having numerous dimensions (legal, technological, policy, scalability) and stakeholders, as well as the availability of international solutions for comparison, and the potential for many open-ended solutions.

One solution that was reviewed during the event was the UK Intellectual Property Office (IPO) and . This tool asks users a series of questions about the work, its intended use and then creates and prices a statutory license.  This allows a streamlined way for users to incorporate potentially orphaned works into their own creations.

Participants of the hackathon included representatives of the IPO along with the Canadian Copyright Board, Canadian Heritage, Canadian Intellectual Property Office, US Copyright Office, and the Lassonde School of Engineering. Leadership on the design process was provided by , a fellow at Stanford Law School’s Centre on the Legal Profession and a lecturer at .

The first day and a half of the event was dedicated to finding the scope of the problem. Midway through day two, the event shifted from analysis to creative problem solving and solution design. And, at the end of day two, solutions to the problem were pitched to an esteemed panel of judges including Justice Roger Hughes of the Federal Court.

The final day of the event focused on building functional demonstrations of the solution in action, a business plan, and a budget.  Ideas and designs from the first day were updated based on feedback using an iterative process. As a participant, this was the most exciting moment of the hackathon, as the focus on "what can we make to solve the problem" became "what are the hurdles we face in making this demo into a living thing".

The demonstration of Orphan hunter (pictured above) won the hackathon's best prototype. The app, a tongue-in-cheek design using a gamified bounty system incentivizing individuals to complete due-diligence searches won over the judges after a strong iteration (and fully functional demo) on the second day. Credit goes to Jordan Fine, Mark Harris Evans, Zorn Pink, Mark Kohras, and John Lee. Their solution included a professionally made demo explaining how someone might use Orphan Hunter.

Paul Blizzard is a JD Candidate at Osgoode Hall Law School. Twitter: .

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