European Commisson Tackles Digitisation and Copyright

The European Commission had adopted a Communication on Copyright in the Knowledge Economy, which aims to tackle the issue of legal challenges of mass-scale digitisation and dissemination of books, particularly in relation to the European library collections.

The Communication was jointly drawn up by Commissioners Charlie McCreevy and Viviane Reding. Digital libraries such as Europeana will provide researchers and consumers across Europe with new ways to gain access to knowledge. For this, however, the EU will need to find a solution for orphan works, whose uncertain copyright status means they often cannot be digitised. Improving the distribution and availability of works for persons with disabilities, particularly the visually impaired, is another cornerstone of the Communication.

On adoption, Commissioners McCreevy and Reding stressed that the debate over the Google Books Settlement in the United States once again has shown that Europe could not afford to be left behind on the digital frontier.

"We must boost Europe as a centre of creativity and innovation. The vast heritage in Europe's libraries cannot be left to languish but must be made accessible to our citizens", Commissioner McCreevy, responsible for the Internal Market, stated.

Commissioner Reding, in charge of Information Society and Media, said: "Important digitisation efforts have already started all around the globe. Europe should seize this opportunity to take the lead, and to ensure that books digitisation takes place on the basis of European copyright law, and in full respect of Europe's cultural diversity. Europe, with its rich cultural heritage, 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 Communication addresses the actions that the Commission intends to launch: digital preservation and dissemination of scholarly and cultural material and of orphan works, as well as access to knowledge for persons with disabilities. The challenges identified by the Commission today stem from last year's public consultation on a Green Paper ( IP/08/1156 ), the Commission's High Level Group on Digital Libraries and the experiences gained with Europe's Digital Library Europeana (IP/09/1257).

The recent information hearings held by the Commission on the Google Books Settlement Agreement highlighted the anomalous situation that would arise were the

Settlement to be approved, namely that the vast number of European works in U.S. libraries that have been digitised by Google would only be available to consumers and researchers in the U.S. but not in Europe itself. Ensuring that Europeans are given access to their own cultural heritage, while European authors are fairly remunerated, is therefore of immediate concern and will require European responses, as recently stressed jointly by Commissioners Reding and McCreevy (MEMO/09/376)

Digital Preservation and Dissemination

The Commission will now engage in a stakeholder dialogue to find 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.

Orphan Works

The digitisation and dissemination of orphan works pose a particular cultural and economic challenge – the absence of a known rightholder means that users are unable to obtain the required authorisation, e.g. a book cannot be digitised. Orphan works represent a substantial part of the collections of Europe's cultural institutions (e.g., the British Library estimates that 40 percent of its copyrighted collections are orphan 1 ). The Commission will now examine this phenomenon more in detail via an impact assessment. The aim is for an EU-wide solution to facilitate the digitisation and dissemination of orphan works and the establishment of common 'due diligence' standards to recognise orphan status across the EU. First 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 (launched in November 2008 ) is aimed at identifying rights holders and clarifying the rights status of a work, including whether it is out of print or orphan: "The EU-funded ARROW project is a first step to link Europe's different rights registries and make it easier to identify rights holders," said Commissioners Reding and McCreevy today: " 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."

Access for Persons with Disabilities

Persons with disabilities experience obstacles in accessing information. In particular, visually impaired people experience a "book famine" – only 5% of European publications are available in accessible formats, a situation compounded by restrictions on cross-border distribution, even between countries sharing a language. A stakeholder forum on the needs of disabled persons, in particular visually impaired persons, will examine policy responses, including ways to encourage the unencumbered EU trade of works in accessible formats.

YouTube Addresses Copyright

Wired has an interesting article on how the issue of copyright infringement on YouTube is being tackled.

Its ContentID program was initially designed to discover and delete copyrighted material from YouTube. Now, it can also compensate artists whose work is being infringed:

YouTube's database of audio and video fingerprints is learning how to deal with the fact that the guy who added a saxophone part to a particular song deserves a certain minute percentage of revenue when the song appears in your YouTube video. When you upload a video with someone else's song as the soundtrack, you infringe on two exclusive rights of the copyright holder: the right to to distribute the work and the right to synchronize it to video. Nobody cares.

YouTube's database pays the saxophonist (and everyone else with a stake in the song) a percentage of ad revenue, depending on the way their contracts worked out. This explains why the JK Wedding Dance video was able to feature Chris Brown's “Forever” without permission, without being taken down.

That said, you can't please everyone. Warner Music Group thinks YouTube's revenue-sharing deal is too paltry and refuses to participate. The label also has a problem with guitar-themed videogames and a longstanding quarrel with YouTube.

But Warner's in the minority here. Other major (and independent) labels have embraced YouTube's partner program, so that in many cases, you can put entire copyrighted songs in your videos and upload them to YouTube. Just one caveat: If it becomes a hit - as the folks behind the JK Wedding Video found out - the rights-holders of the music will get paid while you, most likely, will not.

Copyright Talk

The Irish Writers' Centre in Dublin is running a Writing Week from 18-22 May, during which there will be a variety of writing courses, readings, seminars, literary events and workshops.

An event that should be of interest to many writers will be taking place on Thursday May 21st at 3 pm. Samantha Holman, the Director of the Irish Copyright Licensing Agency, will be giving a talk on the subject of "Copyright, PLR & The Google Book Settlement".

Admission is free.

From 50 to 70 in 2 Years

Bill Jones, writing on the Copyright and Technology Blog, has a useful summary of the recent decision by the EU parliament to extend the copyright term for music recordings from 50 years to 70 years.

To ensure that performers benefit fully from the additional royalties thanks to the copyright extension, MEPs amended the original text to prevent the use of previous contractual agreements to deduct money from the additional royalties.

Also included in the legislation is a dedicated fund for session musicians. This fund will be financed by contributions from producers, who will be obliged to set aside at least 20% of the revenues gained from the proposed extension of copyright term. The fund will reward session musicians who gave up their rights when signing the contract for their performance. Collecting societies, which represent performers' and producers' interests, will retain the right to administer the annual supplementary remuneration.

Member States will have two years to incorporate the new legislation in their respective countries.

The Parliament also asked the Commission to launch an impact assessment of the situation in the European audiovisual sector by January 2010, with a view to deciding whether a similar copyright extension would benefit the audiovisual world.

Google Book Deal

The IPSG would like to bring the Google Book Settlement to the attention of Irish authors.

In 2004 Google began digitising all the books in the University of Michigan library. Shortly afterwards the Authors Guild, the Association of American Publishers, and a group of authors and publishers filed a class-action lawsuit for copyright infringement.

In November 2008 those representatives reached an out-of-court settlement with Google that would -- if approved by federal court -- allow Google to publish online out-of-print books for reading, sales, institutional licensing, ad sales, and other publishing exploitations.

The settlement gave the class-action attorneys $30 million, a new governing rights body called the Book Rights Registry (BRR) $35 million, and set aside $45 million for writers infringed up to now. The BRR will act as the agency that will forward payments of 63 per cent of revenue earned by Google to authors for future use of their works. You can read the Authors Guild's statement online about the settlement.

This deal remains subject to a final fairness hearing, which is scheduled for June 11, 2009.

Last month a conference organised by the Kernochan Centre for Law, Media and the Arts discussed the ramifications of the deal, and raised concerns. These issues are never straightforward. Wired has pointed out that the law school is funded in part by Microsoft, one of Google's oldest competitors.

At this point Google has digitised over seven million books, and now has the non-exclusive right to digitise every book published before January 5, 2009. Google will have to negotiate directly with publishers for rights to all works published after January 5th, 2009.

Authors who want their books excluded from the settlement must formally opt-out by May 5, 2009.

Authors who wish to agree to the terms of the settlement must claim every edition of their book(s) associated with their name that has been published in the USA. They will receive an once-off payment of at least $60 per book from Google to cover any infringement of their copyright so far. Further payment for online use of the texts will either be charged as a flat fee, or writers can ask Google to calculate an "optimal price" for their book based on demand.

The Irish Times published a story on the matter last week.

At a recent seminar, Samantha Holman, chief executive of the Irish Copyright Licensing Agency, was worred that many Irish writers were unaware of the terms of the Google Book Settlement.

Although the settlement was for a class action suit in the US, Holman notes that Google was required to notify copyright groups everywhere in the world, and says the settlement notice warned global copyright holders "to assume that you own a US copyright interest in your book". Holman says authors can probably expect a similar settlement with Google in future in countries and territories outside the US and cautioned authors against assuming the company might find little commercial value in the project.

"Google has been very successful so far, and there's no reason to think they won't be very successful at this," she says.

Holman notes that some Irish writers have even found their doctoral thesis listed on the Google settlement site and so she encourages anyone who has ever written anything to search under their name for any works. The settlement "is not the perfect solution by any means. But it is the solution being proposed," she told authors. "You have to start reading your contracts carefully."

Finally, this week Google announced a deal with Sony that will make 500,000 public domain titles available for download from Google Book Search in a format that is compatible with Sony's ebook Reader.