Dear EBLIDA members,
EBLIDA has been invited to speak at the European Commission’s hearing on Orphan Works to be held on Monday 26th October in Brussels:
http://ec.europa.eu/internal_market/copyright/copyright-infso/copyright-infso_en.htm#publichearing
The EBLIDA Expert Group on Information Law, which represents a wide range of countries and libraries, have discussed the submission at their recent meeting and are helping to draft some text which will be presented by me on Monday.
You are welcome to input your own views for this submission and you should send these to me by Thursday this week. I apologise for the short notice – this hearing was announced without very much warning and during a period of time when I have been travelling a lot without much internet access.
The main theme of the submission will be to say that libraries favour a new mandatory exception which would allow digitization of orphan works without fear of prosecution and that if a rights holder subsequently appears, the library will simply need to remove the object if so requested. Obviously a library would still need to do some investigation to show that the item was believed to be orphan. We will say that we prefer this solution to the solution currently possible in some countries which allows licensing with the rights holders organizations.
A full explanation of these points will be included in our submission and will be circulated to you at the weekend in advance of the hearing. A report of the hearing will be made in the next EBLIDA newsletter. If you have any questions in the meantime, please let me know.
Best regards, Joanne
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Joanne Yeomans, Director EBLIDA.
European Bureau of Library, Information and Documentation Associations.
Secretariat EBLIDA – P.O. Box 16359,
NL – 2500 BJ The Hague – The Netherlands.