Information Sans Frontières, a newly formed alliance from the library world (Europeana, JISC, LIBER and EBLIDA) has just released a memorandum on the proposed orphan works directive addressed to the Council of the European Union. The memorandum, backed by some of the the most obvious beneficiaries of the proposed directive is nevertheless highly of the proposal:
Information Sans Frontières is an alliance representing the institutions in the Member States addressed by the proposed Directive. We urge that the Directive should embrace unpublished as well as published works, and creative works in all media. We are unanimously of the view that the Directive is in danger of failing to achieve its policy objectives, in particular large-scale digitization projects. The Presidency compromise proposal has several inherent contradictions with respect to the purpose of the Directive.
- It is too prescriptive of the methods to be used by the target institutions, insisting on procedures that in some cases will be impracticable
- It is insufficiently hospitable to solutions based on licensing, which are mentioned briefly in Recital 20 but which have no legislative support in the following Articles in order to allow them to function across borders
- It seeks to modify the exceptions contained in Directive 2001/29/EC by adding further restrictions on the freedom of action of the target institutions
- It prescribes over-burdensome methods for institutions to publish their records
You can read the full text of the memorandum here (ISF does not seem to have a website yet).
The memorandum echoes some of the objectives raised by COMMUNIA in our own policy paper on the directive, and raises a couple of issues that we have not touched upon. It is of course rather worrisome that and organization such as Europeana, which embodies the aspirations of the Europeana Union in the digital heritage realm, makes it this clear that the proposed directive will not make it any easier for them to achieve it’s objectives. This is even more worrying since it is the same European Commission that is formulating these objectives, via it’s Recommendation Commission recommendation on the digitisation and online accessibility of cultural material.
