Brussels, 19/10/2009 (Agence Europe) - On Monday 19 October, the European Commission adopted a communication on Copyright in the Knowledge Economy aiming to tackle the important cultural and legal challenges of digitisation and dissemination of books, in particular of European library collections. The communication was jointly drawn up by Commissioners Viviane Reding (Information Society and Media) and Charlie McCreevy (Internal Market). “Europe should seize this opportunity … to ensure that books digitisation takes place on the basis of European copyright law, and in full respect of Europe's cultural diversity. 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,” said Reding. “We must boost Europe as a centre of creativity and innovation,” added McCreevy.
The Communication addresses the initiatives that the Commission intends to launch, a highly topical challenge following the controversy surrounding the “Google Books affair” (see EUROPE 9971 and 9974). The Commission wants viable solutions for simple and cost-efficient rights clearance covering mass-scale digitisation and the online dissemination of library collections still protected by copyright. This concerns both out-of-print works and orphan works, i.e. works whose owner cannot be identified or located, digitisation of which cannot go ahead since, with no known copyright holder, the required authorisation cannot be obtained. The Commission now wants to find a solution to make it possible to digitise and disseminate these works, and to establish common “due diligence” standards to recognise orphan status across the EU. Progress in this respect has already been made by the ARROW (Accessible Registries of Rights information and Orphan works) project which gathers national libraries, collective management organisations and publishers and is co-funded by the European Commission under the eContent plus programme (€2.5 million). This project seeks to identify rights holders and clarify the rights status of a work, including whether it is out of print or orphan. Improving the distribution and availability of works for persons with disabilities, particularly the visually impaired, is another cornerstone of the communication. (I.L./transl/.rt)