Directive on orphan works and its impact on the Polish copyright law

The paper discusses the impact of the Directive on certain permitted uses of orphan works on the Polish legal system. The author first presents the solutions applied in the foreign legal systems (US, Canada and the UK ). Thereafter, the paper analyzes the question whether the system employed in the Directive, that involves a thorough search for entities with copyrights as a precondition for using those works, constitutes the right approach. The author claims that such procedure may not be appropriate in the case of orphan work with several authors, as it is the case in the European Union. The author argues that a better way of addressing the problem would be to entrust the management of orphan works with specialized entities that would pay remuneration to parties entitled to copyright once they emerge. The Polish Copyright Act should provide for such a procedure and the author advocates an appropriate implementation of the Directive into the Polish law