Draft Broadcasting Treaty: issues for libraries Mr Chairman, I am speaking on behalf of the International Federation of Library Associations and also on behalf of one of its members, Electronic Information for Libraries.

Libraries collect, organise and preserve our global cultural and scientific knowledge and heritage. The richness of the content we hold is much enhanced by the inclusion of audiovisual material. The raison d'etre of libraries is to collect and preserve our knowledge for the purposes of making the content available and providing access to the public.

Any new right which affects access to content is of concern to librarians because it imposes an additional barrier to access to knowledge, particularly content in the public domain. Without exceptions and limitations for libraries the draft Broadcasting Treaty would in practice prevent a librarian from making an off-air recording of a broadcast and then make it available to library users. Unless licensed to do so, the librarian would not be allowed to make a copy of a recorded event for lending purposes. The media used for recordings wear out quickly and therefore libraries have to make new copies for preservation purposes and need to be able to transfer the recordings to new media as existing media soon becomes obsolete and the equipment no longer exists to play them. Where a broadcast is protected by a TPM a library would not be allowed to remove it unless there were exceptions for this purpose.

We support Brazil's proposal in the Corrigendum to document SCCR/13/3 issued 21st November, which proposes inter alia a redraft of Article 14 to provide a list of limitations and exceptions and the deletion of Article 16 on TPMs.

Thank you, Mr Chairman.

Contacts:

Teresa Hackett, eIFL-net IP Project Teresa.Hackett@eifl.net

Barbara Stratton, IFLA Copyright and other Legal Matters Committee Barbara.Stratton@cilip.org.uk

Harald von Hielmcrone, IFLA Copyright and other Legal Matters Committee hvh@statsbiblioteket.dk