«Orphant Works» as Objects of Copyright: Concept, Legal Regime of Use

The purpose of the work is to comprehensively investigate «orphan works» as objects of copyright: the causes and scale of the problem; consider the conceptual legal interpretation, essential features, detection mechanisms, legal grounds for the transition to the public domain, experience in developing a legal regime for their use in the European Union, Great Britain, Canada, and the United States in the context of increasing public demand for the possibility of free and high-tech access to knowledge, innovations, and cultural heritage; to analyze the initiatives of Ukrainian scientists and developments in Ukrainian legislation on this topic. To achieve the goal, the following issues were considered: normative legal acts of the legislation of Ukraine, which regulate social relations in the fi eld of copyright and related rights; acts of secondary EU law (directives and recommendations) that defi ned the legal and organizational mechanisms for the legal activity of «memory institutions» for the use of «orphan works» in the context of the digitization of European cultural heritage and access to digital content; legislative acts of individual foreign countries related to the issues of the article. The research methodology is based on the application of general scientifi c (historical, logical, systemic, structural-functional, logical-semantic) and special scientifi c (comparative legal, terminological analysis, source analysis and synthesis) methods. The scientifi c novelty, considering the lack of research in Ukrainian archival studies of the mentioned topic, is in the comprehensive coverage of the foreign experience of legalizing the use of «orphan works». The conclusions justify the need to study this experience and adapt it to solving the problems and tasks of archival aff airs of the state.