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 News From You
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Week ending February 27, 2010
In a draft report unanimously adopted on Monday, the EP Committee on Culture and Education welcomes the opening and development of Europeana, Europe's online library, museum and archive. At the same time MEPs regret the uneven contributions from member states to its content, stress the need to respect intellectual property rights and encourage the EU to undertake part of the project's costs after 2013.
The aim of this EU project, operational from November 2008, is to make Europe's cultural and scientific heritage accessible to all on the internet. At the end of last year it offered 4.6 million digitised works, including books, maps, film clips and photographs. MEPs support the objective to reach 10 million objects by June this year and call for at least 15 million different digitised objects by 2015. In 2011 Europeana.eu will be more multilingual and contain semantic web features. The site is run by the Europeana office, hosted by the Dutch National Library.
Content: more contributions needed
Although more than 1000 cultural institutions contribute content to Europeana, the contribution by different member states is very uneven. Only 5% of all digital books are available in Europeana. Almost half of these (47%) come from France; other big contributing countries are Germany (16%), the Netherlands (8%) and the UK (8%). For legal reasons, Europeana includes neither out-of-print books (90% of the content of national libraries) nor orphan works, whose authors cannot be identified (10 to 20% of national collections).
While welcoming the opening and development of Europeana, MEPs "seriously regret" the uneven contributions from member states to its content. They encourage governments and cultural institutions to cooperate in speeding up the digitisation, "not to restrict availability to the territory of their country" and provide more audio and video material, "paying special attention to those works which deteriorate easily". MEPs propose to organise a funding and advertising campaign entitled "Join Europeana".
The draft report urges the Commission and member states to take all necessary steps to avoid a knowledge gap between Europe and non-EU countries, making Europeana "one of the main reference points for education and research purposes". The committee also encourages the creation of a separate online space on Europeana where users can create content.
MEPs stress that "the portal should take into account the needs of disabled people". They are also "convinced that public domain content in the analogue world should remain in the public domain in the digital environment even after the format shift".
Copyright and access
Europeana should "respect intellectual property rights, especially authors' and performers' rights", stress MEPs. They also stress the need to protect the integrity of the author's work and avoid any possible changes to it or censorship. The committee encourages finding solutions for Europeana to offer in-copyright as well as out-of-print and orphan works, such as extended collective licensing or other collective management practices. MEPs "endorse the Commission's intention to establish a simple and cost-efficient rights clearance system", working in close cooperation with all the stakeholders.
On the other hand, according to MEPs, digitisation by itself should not bring about any new copyright, nor result in privatising or restricting access to Europe’s public heritage. They warn that the dissemination of knowledge on the Internet should not be left to private commercial firms.
MEPs call on the Commission to introduce a legislative proposal on the digitisation, preservation and dissemination of orphan works, which would put an end to the current legal uncertainty, and to develop a European database of these works.
Funding
Europeana is funded by the eContentplus programme, by the Competitiveness and Innovation programme, and by some Member States and cultural institutions. While encouraging public-private partnerships as well as the creation of a sustainable financing and governance model for the project in the long term, the Committee underlines that a substantial part of its costs should be included in a separate budget line of the EU Multiannual Financial Framework after 2013.
This own-initiative report should be voted in plenary in April.
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