World libraries and Copyright: Works covered by copyright need to be digitized

Comité des Sages (high-level reflection group) on Digitisation of Europe’s cultural heritage has released a 45-page report “Digital Renaissance” which calls on member states to increase their efforts to digitize the collections of libraries, archives and museums. The report was delivered to Neelie Kroes, European Commission Vice-President for the Digital Agenda, and Androulla Vassiliou, Commissioner responsible for Education and Culture. Among measures offered by report’s authors is development of a central European Digital library Europeana and digitization of works that are covered by copyright. Authors highlight that digitization of the digital heritage will have a positive impact on the Europe’s economy.

Neelie Kroes said: "Bringing our museums' and libraries' collections online not only shows Europe's rich history and culture but can also usher in new benefits for education, for innovation and for generating new economic activities."

Key conclusions and recommendations of the report are:

- The Europeana portal should become the central reference point for Europe's online cultural heritage. Member States must ensure that all material digitised with public funding is available on the site, and bring all their public domain masterpieces into Europeana by 2016. Cultural institutions, the European Commission and Member States should actively and widely promote Europeana.

- Works that are covered by copyright, but are no longer distributed commercially, need to be brought online. It is primarily the role of rights-holders to digitise these works and exploit them. But, if rights holders do not do so, cultural institutions must have a window of opportunity to digitise material and make it available to the public, for which right holders should be remunerated.

- EU rules for orphan works (whose rights holders cannot be identified) need to be adopted as soon as possible to eliminate problems with digitization of such works in future.

- Member States need to considerably increase their funding for digitisation in order to generate jobs and growth in the future. The funds are needed to pay for the digitisation of 16% of all available books in EU libraries, or the digitisation of every piece of audio content in EU Member States' cultural institutions.

- Public-private partnerships for digitisation must be encouraged. They must be transparent, non-exclusive and equitable for all partners, and must result in cross-border access to the digitised material for all. Preferential use of the digitised material granted to the private partner should not exceed seven years.

- To guarantee the preservation of collections in their digital format, a second copy of this cultural material should be archived at Europeana. In addition, a system should be developed so that any cultural material that currently needs to be deposited in several countries would only be deposited once.

Recommendations of the reflection group will become a part the European Commission’s Digital Agenda for Europe.