On Thursday 26 and Friday 27 November 2015, the National Library of Luxembourg (BnL) held the 4th Europeana Licensing Workshop Luxembourg, alongside the Institute for Information Law of the University of Amsterdam and the digital Thinktank 'Kennisland' of Amsterdam.
The seminar took place within the context of copyright reform in Europe and focused on the issue of the clarification of rights in digitisation projects of cultural institutions. The instrument of extended collective licensing was discussed in the 2014 workshop and the final report by Lucia Guibault, submitted for publication in the Journal of Intellectual Property, Information Technology and Electronic Commerce Law, was presented on Thursday 26 November 2015, proposing an implementation based on the principle of the country of origin.
According to Europeana, a cross-border perspective is required. The implementation would be facilitated by the definition of a new copyright exception to the benefit of cultural institutes. The first day of the workshop was devoted to a detailed discussion of the characteristics of such an exception, particularly with regards to copyright reform in Europe.
The second day of the seminar was devoted to presentations of projects with the objective of facilitating the clarification and management of copyright on digitisation:
- The 'EnDOW' project aims to create an online service like 'crowdsourcing' to conduct digilent research in accordance with the European directive 'Orphan works'.
- The 'outofcopyright.eu' website equipped with an online decision tree editor
- The project 'rightsstatements.org' looking to create a set of harmonised definitions of rights between Digital Public Library of America (DPLA) partners and Europeana.
The BnL is actively involved in the three projects, with the last two hosted in Luxembourg data centres.
The seminar ended with a discussion on the implementation of the Treaty of Marrakech, introducing a new exception to copyright for the benefit of the visually impaired and an exploration of the situation of human rights registers, a proposed topic for the 5th Europeana Licensing Workshop planned for next year.
The 2015 seminar constituted around 20 international participants including representatives of cultural institutes active in the digital sector (Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin, Deutsche Digitale Bibliothek); copyright specialists (KU Leueven, CIPPM Bournemouth); and political representatives (European Commission).
As an institution coordinator of the workshop, the National Library was represented by Patrick Peiffer, Europeana project manager and head of department Consortium Luxembourg at the BnL.
Photo by BnL (L-R: Marie-Christine Janssens; Paul Keller; Lucie Guibault; Gilles Zeimet; Simone Schroff; Lisette Kalshoven; Maarten Zeinstra; Ellen Euler; Paul Klimpel; Luis Ferrão; Patrick Peiffer; Marcella Favale; Armin Talke; Sylvie Nérisson; Maurizio Borghi; Rán Tryggvadottir; Annemarie Beunen)
