Federal Act on Copyright and Related Rights
(Copyright Act, CopA)

¹ A work is con­sidered to be orphaned if the hold­ers of the rights to the work re­main un­known or can­not be found fol­low­ing an ap­pro­pri­ate re­search ef­fort.

² The rights to the orphan work un­der Art­icle 10 may only be as­ser­ted by au­thor­ised col­lect­ive rights man­age­ment or­gan­isa­tions if the work is used on the basis of a copy of a work which:

a.

is con­tained in col­lec­tions held by pub­lic or pub­licly ac­cess­ible lib­rar­ies, edu­ca­tion­al in­sti­tu­tions, mu­seums, col­lec­tions and archives or in archive col­lec­tions of broad­cast­ing or­gan­isa­tions; and

b.

was pro­duced, copied, or made avail­able in Switzer­land, or handed over to an in­sti­tu­tion with­in the mean­ing of let­ter a.

³ Orphan works are con­sidered to be pub­lished. If oth­er works or par­tial works are in­teg­rated in­to an orphan work, para­graph 2 also ap­plies to the as­ser­tion of the rights to these works or par­tial works in­so­far as these do not sig­ni­fic­antly de­term­ine the unique char­ac­ter of the archived works.

⁴ The rights hold­ers have a right to re­mu­ner­a­tion for the use of the work. This may not ex­ceed the re­mu­ner­a­tion provided for in the dis­tri­bu­tion reg­u­la­tions of the rel­ev­ant col­lect­ive rights man­age­ment or­gan­isa­tion for the use of the work.

⁵ Art­icle 43aap­plies to the use of a lar­ger num­ber of works on the basis of cop­ies of works from col­lec­tions un­der para­graph 2 let­ter a.

⁶ If no rights hold­ers present them­selves with­in 10 years, the pro­ceeds of ex­ploit­a­tion, by way of derog­a­tion from Art­icle 48 para­graph 2, shall be used in their en­tirety for so­cial wel­fare pur­poses and for the ap­pro­pri­ate pro­mo­tion of cul­ture.