On May 12, COMMUNIA hosted an online Salon on the unfair practices that have become commonplace in licensing negotiations between rightholders and libraries in the public and academic sectors. The video recording is now available through Vimeo.
To kick things off, COMMUNIA Legal Director Teresa Nobre presented our latest report, Unfair licensing practices: the library experience, which contains numerous firsthand accounts of licensing negotiations from licensing managers of public and academic libraries as well as explicit examples of egregious contract clauses that libraries were forced to accept. Following her presentation, Nicola Bieg from the TIB – Leibniz Information Centre for Science and Technology and Dyveke Sijm of the ICOLC Coordinating Committee shared their first-hand experiences negotiating licenses for libraries. During their interventions, both speakers focussed particularly on how choice of law clauses are being used to allow rightholders to introduce contract clauses to severely limit TDM and AI uses of licensed works for libraries and their users far beyond what would usually be possible under EU law. The event was moderated by Teresa Hackett.
