Europeana Licensing Workshop
Lisette Kalshoven from Kennisland gives us an overview of important discussions at a recent licensing workshop.
The second Europeana Licensing Workshop took place in Luxembourg on 13-14 June.
The workshop was part of research undertaken for the Europeana Awareness project by the Bibliothèque nationale de Luxembourg, Kennisland and the Institute for Information Law (IvIR) of the University of Amsterdam. The workshop discussed a legal framework for cross-border licensing of copyright-protected works in Europe. The research explores the conditions under which a system allowing the use of copyright-protected works, contained in the collections of cultural heritage institutions, would be workable on a cross-border basis in the context of Europeana. A final report is due in June 2014.
On the first day of the workshop, Paul Keller from Kennisland started the presentations with an overview of the status of the Europeana Licensing Framework. Europeana is currently darfting recommendations for reviewing the Licensing Framework, which was impletemented in 2011. Julia Fallon from Europeana then updated the participants on the Europeana Commission's Licences For Europe working group on audiovisual heritage. There are two agreements under development in this field - a memorandum of understanding and a model contract.
After lunch, Enrico Turrin from ARROW discussed ARROW’s distributed system for facilitating rights information management in mass digitisation programmes. He pointed out that the programme is scalable for further applications. After which Godfrey Rust, from rights.com explained the possible applications for the Linked Content Coalition’s (LCC) Rights Reference Model in the cultural heritage domain in the context of developing rich rights metadata. Francesca Schulze from the German National Library spoke about the implementations of the Orphan Works directive (an orphan work is a copyrighted work for which the copyright holder cannot be contacted) in the German cultural heritage domain. They are developing a pilot infrastructure now.
During the evening, a guided tour of the - unfortunately very rainy - old city was on the programme, followed by the workshop dinner, offered by the Bibliothèque nationale de Luxembourg.
On the second day of the workshop, which focused on the legal environment, contractual arrangements and ongoing developments, Lucie Guibault from IvIR talked about the interaction between the memorandum of understanding, the Orphan Works directive and the proposed directive on collective management concerning cross-border use of music. Olav Stokkmo from IFFRO, the International Federation of Reproduction Rights Organisations and Publishers, spoke about making out-of-commerce works available legally. After which, Réka Markovich from EUscreen discussed the legal issues in the online collections of European audiovisual heritage.
Antoinette Graves from the UK Intellectual Property Office spoke about the UK domestic Orphan Works Scheme. It is based on the Canadian model as the Extended Collective Licensing (ECL) model was not deemed compatible with the desired commercial use possibilties. From the National Library of Sweden, Jerker Rydén discussed the issues for cross-border commercial use of the Nordic Extended Collective Licensing interoperability initiative. He stated that use of ECL commercially is possible, but that there is the risk of a massive opt-out.
Paul Klimpel has written a paper on legal fictions in copyright clearance. He illustrated this paper during the workshop, offering an enriching point of view in the current debates. Marco Giorello, deputy head of the Copyright Unit (DG MARKT) of the European Commission gave an update on the ongoing work and implementation of the Orphan Works directive. He stated that Germany, Austria and the Czech Republic have proposals for implementing the directive ready. Lastly, Luis Ferraro, Principal Administrator for the Creativity Unit of the European Commission (DG CONNECT), spoke about culture and creativity in the digital realm.
All together, the presentations gave a good review of the current state of affairs in the realm of clearing rights for cultural works in Europe. View all the presentations. The review on the Europeana Licensing Framework will be presented later in June as a project deliverable.