The Netherlands non-voluntary licenses for reprography
by James Packard Love
This from the joint IFRRO WIPO Publication on Collective Management in Reprography, written by Tarja Koskinen-Olsson, April 2005. It describes non-voluntary licenses to make copies of works in the Netherlands.
Educational institutions, libraries, government agencies and other institutions working in the public interest have been able to issue photocopies for internal use to students, mutual lending between libraries and to civil servants respectively, provided that fair compensation is paid to the national RRO, Stichting REPRORECHT. The reproduction right fee is set by statute. An amendment of the Dutch Copyright Act of 1912, accepted in March 2002, extended the effect of the legal licence. After a legislative process lasting some years, it now covers the public sector and the business sector.It would be interesting (and important) to estimate the rates for such licenses that would be appropriate for developing countries.
posted by James Packard Love at 11:48 AM
3 Comments:
Perhaps you should look at the Scandinavian models on Compulsory licences.
Although compulsory licenses make sense in certain circumstances, making copies of works should be permitted under the fair use doctrine in other situations. For instance, Google's Library Project involves scanning complete books for a database, but the end user will only see "snippets" (Google's term) of the books when the Google user enters a search term, unless the copyright owner has consented to a larger display. That interim copying of a book to create a different work that is not itself substantially similar to the original book should be a fair use (under U.S. law) without paying any license fee. A similar fair use argument can be made for translating books into the native languages of citizens of developing countries, at least to the extent to which the copyright owners have no interest in pursuing. If it is a fair use, there should be no need for a license fee.
Although compulsory licenses make sense in certain circumstances, making copies of works should be permitted under the fair use doctrine in other situations. For instance, Google's Library Project involves scanning complete books for a database, but the end user will only see "snippets" (Google's term) of the books when the Google user enters a search term, unless the copyright owner has consented to a larger display. That interim copying of a book to create a different work that is not itself substantially similar to the original book should be a fair use (under U.S. law) without paying any license fee. A similar fair use argument can be made for translating books into the native languages of citizens of developing countries, at least to the extent to which the copyright owners have no interest in pursuing. If it is a fair use, there should be no need for a license fee.
Doug Rogers
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