Intellectual Property and Growth review

The Independent Review of IP and Growth today published its report Digital Opportunity: A Review of Intellectual Property and Growth. Its recommendtions cover the whole range of Intellectual Property issues, including designs and patents as well as copyright. However, some elements of the report are of particular relevance to libraries including:

• encouraging the creation of a Digital Copyright Exchange to manage the licensing of copyright material;


• creating "Extended Collective Licensing" to enable digitisation of orphan works (works for which copyright holders cannot be traced);


• introducing a copyright exception to facilitate text mining for non-commercial use (and advocating for changes within the EU to permit this for commercial use);


• recommending extending copyright exceptions to facilitate library digitisation of orphan works and to enable preservation of multimedia materials.

The report also makes other important recommendations (some of which were proposed by the Gowers Review of Intellectual Property in 2006 - but have yet to be implemented), including the creation of a copyright exception for format shifting activities for private use (eg copying CDs to computer or MP3 devices), and steps to prevent commercial contracts from overriding copyright exceptions. It discusses how "the concept of 'ownership' and 'purchase' has itself been redefined" (p.68) by new technologies and sales models - a major challenge for libraries since the beginning of online database and e-journal delivery.

Another significant observation from the review, potentially of relevance to my interest in social enterprise, is the scale of the potential benefits to small and medium enterprises from improving IP frameworks.

Legal deposit regulations and Intellectual Property review

In a previous post I mentioned the recent Consultation on the Draft Legal Deposit Libraries (Non-print Publications) Regulations 2011. The Government published its response last week, which was welcomed by the legal deposit libraries.

I've also been looking at the Independent Review of IP and Growth: Submissions Received webpage, which now includes all the consultation responses due to be published. From that site, I've just been reading the British Library's Response from the British Library to the Independent Review of Intellectual Property and Growth.

British Library, copyright and legal deposit

Last Friday I was at the British Library in London, which gives me an excuse to post this photo I took. (Complete with a nice spring sky, in contrast to today's foggy and gloomy Sheffield...)

The British Library has recently published Growing Knowledge: The British Library's Strategy 2011-2015 its strategy document for the next four years. This provides a useful insight into the key priority areas which the library has identified, and adds detail to the 2020 Vision document, which was published last year.

I've also been having a look at some of the submissions published so far on the Independent Review of IP and Growth website. So far, this just seems to be a selection of the submissions recieved (the consultation deadline was 4 March), but the JISC (Joint Information Systems Committee) contribution is interesting - discussing copyright issues surrounding orphan works, digitisation projects, open educational resources and the advantages of open access publishing. It also refers to a British Library document Driving UK Research: Is Copyright a Help or a Hindrance? detailing researchers' personal experiences of copyright issues.

Between 1709 and 1911, copyright was linked to the requirement for the deposit of copies of every published work with a selection of "copyright" libraries. Although these functions (copyright and legal deposit) have now been separated in legislation, the requirement to provide copies of every work published in the UK to each of the 6 legal deposit libraries (the British Library, National Library of Wales, National Library of Scotland, Bodleian Library, Cambridge University Library and Trinity College, Dublin) remains. Another consultation has recently considered the implementation of extended legal deposit provisions to cover non-print materials, building on legislation originally passed in 2003. There's some useful information about this on the Consultation on the Draft Legal Deposit Libraries (Non-print Publications) Regulations 2011 website.