Brussels, 07/06/2012 (Agence Europe) - On 6 June, representatives from the European Parliament and the Council of Ministers concluded an informal agreement on the European Commission's draft directive on orphan works. This constitutes a preliminary agreement negotiated in trialogue, before adoption of the European Parliament's legal affairs committee report and an agreement at the Council. Once adopted, this legislation will help all sides to obtain access to orphan works, which is not currently the case, due to difficulties involved in identifying the authors.
Internal Market and Services Commissioner Michel Barnier was delighted with the trialogue agreement. He said, “Libraries and museums will now be able to digitalise, preserve and put online cultural treasures they have in their collections. European citizens will have access to our cultural heritage online, wherever they are. At the same time, authors' rights will be protected. This is my vision of the digital single market”. Polish Socialist, Lidia Geringer de Oedenberg, who has been leading the negotiations for Parliament, said that this was a first step towards the harmonisation of copyright rules in the EU. She asserted that “the regulation will promote culture and finally make it possible to make some hidden treasures available to the general public”.
According to the agreement concluded, a work would be deemed to be orphan if, after a “diligent” search made in good faith, it was not possible to identify or locate the copyright holder. Works granted orphan status would be then made public, through digitisation and only for non-profit purposes. Today, digitising an orphan work can be difficult, if not impossible, since in the absence of the right holder there is no way to obtain permission to do so. Parliament's negotiating team secured provisions to make it safer and easier for public institutions such as museums and libraries to search for and use orphan works. These provisions include clear rules on compensation for right holders who come forward after a work has been placed on line and a possibility for institutions to use any revenue from its use to pay search and digitisation costs. They nonetheless inserted a provision to protect public institutions from the risk of having to pay large sums to authors who show up later. The agreement with the Council also stipulates that a new article be inserted in the draft legislation to allow public institutions to generate some revenue from the use of an orphan work (e.g. goods sold in a museum shop). All of this revenue would have to be used to pay for the search and the digitisation process. (IL/transl.fl)