In a communication published today, commissioners Charlie McCreevy and Viviane Reding set out how they want Europe to preserve and disseminate cultural work in digital form.
The communication comes 15 months after the Commission adopted a green paper on Copyright in the Knowledge Economy and a month after it held hearings in Brussels on the Google Books Settlement Agreement being negotiated in the US.
Today the Commission said that the hearings had highlighted the “anomalous situation” that would arise were the Settlement to be approved, since the vast number of European works in US libraries that have been digitised by Google would only be available to consumers and researchers in the US but not in Europe itself.
Reding, in charge of Information Society and Media at the Commission, said that Europe has most to offer and most to win from books digitisation. “If we act swiftly, pro-competitive European solutions on books digitisation may well be sooner operational than the solutions presently envisaged under the Google Books Settlement in the United States.”
The Commission said it will now look for ways to clear copyright to allow mass-scale digitisation and the online dissemination of library collections still protected by copyright.
But it acknowledged that the digitisation of orphan works pose a particular cultural and economic challenge. Orphan works represent a substantial part of the collections of Europe's cultural institutions. The British Library, for example, estimates that 40% of its copyrighted collections are orphan. The Commission said it will carry out an impact assessment to assess the scale of the problem and consider solutions to it.
An EU-funded project called ARROW (Accessible Registries of Rights information and Orphan works) was launched in November 2008 to try and identify rights holders and clarify the rights status of a work, including whether it is out of print or orphan.
“We call on national libraries, collective management organisations and publishers to build on this good start and work with the Commission to develop a pro-competitive and pan-European system of book registries that will allow for cross-border licensing under a transparent and affordable pricing system, while ensuring a fair remuneration of authors,” said the two commissioners today.
The Commission will hold a public hearing on orphan works in Brussels next Monday.
