European Courts of Justice chamber in Luxembourg.
And while the judgement appears to make CDL possible, Ben said: “There are still lots of unanswered questions, the ruling doesn’t refer to how libraries acquire the books, only that they are acquired law- fully and are downloaded from the library servers on a ‘one copy, one user’ basis in order to mimic the loan of physical books. And I’m not aware of any European-based controlled digital lending service having been launched as a result of this ruling.” He said that the library profession in Europe could have done more to maxim- ise their own interests as a result of this landmark case, but again he hopes KR21 will go some way to helping libraries across Europe understand their rights and the level of risk they face if publishers make legal challenges. He said that KR21 will encourage this boundary pushing activity, but added: “We see a CDL law as the best
solution for libraries because it creates the right for libraries to do what they’ve done for thousands of years – which is to undertake collection development and lend in the way they should. Without being undermined by issues like DRMs, bun- dling, refusal to license, and exorbitantly high prices.
“So, KR21 is focusing on legislative change across Europe. In the case of eBooks the library sector should be advo- cating for libraries to be able to function as libraries in the digital era which means freedom to purchase, collection develop- ment and lending and that’s to be found through CDL. We are planning for our first webinar to be on eBooks and I will be talk- ing about the ECJ ruling in the VOB case, we will have a colleague from #eBookSOS who will be talking about that excellent campaign and Chris Freeland from the
Internet Archive will be talking about Controlled Digital Lending.”
Publisher watching
Ebook licensing is one of the four areas that KnowledgeRights21 will look at. Another is the closely related issue of making sure existing exemptions under copyright law are not undermined by publishers’ licensing contracts or tech- nological protection measures (TPMs). Copyright exceptions are an area of particular interest to Ben whose PhD is a comparative study of intellectual prop- erty law in Europe, Japan and the US regarding the future of AI. He worked on a two-year European Commission funded project looking at the barriers to further uptake in Europe of data analyt- ics and AI technologies and in 2008 he was the first person in Europe to call for a copyright exception for text and data mining.
He gives Pearson as a recent exam- Barbara Stratton. 36 INFORMATION PROFESSIONAL Vanessa Proudman. Stephen Wyber.
ple, saying: “At the end of last year it announced that new subscribers to eBooks would not be allowed to make any copies even though UK copyright law clearly allows researchers to make copies under limitations and excep- tions. Pearson has backtracked after being challenged by London South Bank University, and my understand- ing is that Pearson is actually changing
June 2021
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