[VereinDE-l] Zusammenfassung EU-Konsultation

- Other ideas brought forward are: tax incentives or other incentives for rightholders releasing their (out-of print) material in the public domain; a European charter by which the digitising party commits to the digitisation cataloguing and preservation, but promises not to enter into any commercial relation; and the widespread use of Creative Commons type licences. - Several comments are also made about the way public sector institutions exercise their own intellectual property rights. The suggestion is made by some private and public organisations to bring cultural institutions within the scope of the directive on the re-use of public sector information. Other replies suggest that libraries waive their database rights, to make the widest re-use possible, and that publicly funded material should be in the public domain (including scientific research publications through open access models).

- Proposed solutions for handling orphan works vary widely: they range from changing copyright legislation to developing better tools for locating right owners and making a common European code for dealing with this type of material. Several replies propose to generalise the Nordic model of extended collective licensing for orphan works, whereas other replies recommend the French model as operated for audiovisual orphan works. The Canadian model is also mentioned, in which collecting societies do not play a role. A reserve fund is suggested to compensate authors if they are found after all. Some replies want to go much further, e.g. by making orphan works generally useable until a copyright holder opposes (eventually after a certain period a work has been advertised as an orphan work), or by creating a legal ‘safe haven’ for people using orphan works. Rightholders and collecting societies are generally opposed to legislative change to accommodate the orphan works issue. - The absence of an overview of orphan works is seen as a serious problem. Up-to-date databases of orphan material would help. For running these databases the public could be involved, as well as the collecting societies.

- Practical arrangements proposed to increase the transparency of public domain material and other material available for general use concern the encouragement of repositories of public domain material as well as the creation of overviews of public domain works (e.g. databases with public domain works, or databases with all works and their date of publication, and death date of the authors). Some replies suggest drawing upon the information of collecting societies on public domain works for making these overviews or to engage the public. - Systematic metadata tagging of public domain content (clear and simple labels which are machine-readable) is seen as a way forward. This could possibly be combined with technologies that allow finding and crawling public domain material. - Some replies submit that the use of Creative Commons or similar licences should be systematically recommended and that best practices and examples of voluntary sharing should be widely spread. There should be support for machine-readable schema for licences and intellectual property rights. Another idea is introducing Creative Commons-like options for authors in the legal deposit process. - The Commission is called upon by some to establish and promote initiatives on open access. In this context reference is made to the Berlin and Budapest declarations on open access. Other contributions suggest that the EU should take the lead in defining a digital public domain rights management scheme, that it should carry out a study on the economic importance of public domain material, and that it should encourage a discussion on the use of public domain material.