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  • From: Paul Keller <paul AT creativecommons.org>
  • To: CC Europe <cc-europe AT lists.ibiblio.org>
  • Subject: Re: [CC-Europe] EU directive on collective rights management
  • Date: Mon, 18 Nov 2013 09:21:53 +0100

Dear all,
as you will remember i had send around a call to action with regards to the
last phase of negotiations on the EU directive on collective rights
management at the end of September. First of all i want to thank all of you
who have taken action and gotten into touch with national experts in the
member states.

When i send out that mail the trialogue negotiations had just started. In the
past two months these negotiations between Parliament, the Council and the
Commission have concluded. This means that there is a compromise text that is
acceptable to all three bodies. Before the directive is adopted this
compromise text will need to be approved by Parliament (first in the JURI
committee and then in the plenary). This is expected to happen before
January. You can find the EP press release here:

http://www.europarl.europa.eu/news/en/news-room/content/20131105IPR23815/html/Collective-management-of-copyright-EP-and-Council-strike-a-deal

If you read it all the way to the end you will notice that it contains the
following passage:

> MEPs also succeeded in ensuring that rightholders will have a say in the
> decisions on the management of their rights and the freedom to select the
> collective management organization of their choice. In addition, they made
> sure that rightholders will be able to grant licenses for non-commercial
> uses.


As you can see we have succeeded in keeping the language that allows members
of Collective Rights Management organisations in the final text of the
directive. This means that the directive (once implemented in national law of
the 28 member states should allow members of all collecting societies to
license their works for non-commercial purposes. This opens the door for the
use of non-commercial CC licenses by members of collecting societies that are
currently preventing their members from doing so.

Once the directive is adopted national legislators will have to implement it
in national laws. Since the directive does not explicitly mention CC licenses
(see the two relevant passages in the directive at the end of this mail) this
also means that it is important that all of us work with our national
legislators to ensure that the national implementations for the directive do
indeed create the room for using CC licenses. This will require some effort
and coordination and i will come back to this once the directive has been
adopted.

As far as i am concerned this is substantial step forward for CC in Europe.
Not only does this give members of collecting societies the ability to make
use of some of the CC licenses, but it also shows that it is possible to
influence EU policy in a productive way.

all the best, Paul

p.s: Unfortunately we have not been as successful with the other issue that
we had advocated. The amendments with aimed at ensuring public availability
of repertoire information have not been included in the compromise text
(there was strong resistance from some of the member states). This is
unfortunate since this is a very important question (although not directly CC
related).

> Consideration 9:
>
> … As far as non-commercial uses are concerned, Member States should provide
> that collective management organisations take the necessary steps to ensure
> that their rightholders can exercise the right to grant licences for such
> uses. Such steps should include, inter alia, a decision by the collective
> management organisation on the conditions attached to the exercise of this
> right as well as providing information to their members on these
> conditions. Collective management organisations should inform rightholders
> of their choices and allow them to exercise the rights related to these
> choices as easily as possible. Rightholders who have already authorised the
> collective management organisation may be informed via the website of the
> organisation.
>
> Article 5 (2a):
>
> Rightholders shall have the right to grant licences for the non-commercial
> uses of the rights, categories of rights or types of works and other
> subject matter of their choice.

--
Paul Keller | Creative Commons Collecting Societies Liaison |
paul AT creativecommons.org







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