The Copyright Licensing Agency (CLA) Higher Education licence enables staff at UCL to digitise or photocopy readings for teaching purposes.

It does not cover all published material, so there are some limits to be aware of. Full details of these limits and how the TLS team checks your readings can be found on the Course Readings webpage.

Every three years the licence is re-negotiated with the help of the UUK and Guild HE Copyright Negotiation and Advisory Committee (CNAC).  The new licence period is 2019-22 and in this round there were no major changes.  One new benefit has been that negotiations with RROs in Germany, Belgium and the Netherlands resulted in these country’s materials being brought into the scanning repertoire.  Another new, useful feature is that CLA copies may be made for administrative purposes that are not readings on a named module, for example UCL staff training other UCL staff.  These copies must still adhere to the usual limits but don’t need to be reported.

The licence also allows some photocopying of readings with similar limits to digitising.  Photocopying data is not collected and reported; instead UCL is subject to occasional photocopying data collection surveys.

At UCL the administration of the CLA licence is handled by the library.  The TLS team copyright checks readings to ensure they fall under the CLA licence terms, before processing PDFs or photocopies into a copyright compliant scan, which is recorded and reported to the CLA annually. To take advantage of this service please look at the Course Readings webpage.   If readings aren’t recorded through the library they are not covered by the CLA licence.

In the year 2018-19 UCL reported in excess of 6,500 digitised readings, which were delivered to students through the relevant module’s online reading list.

There is already a great deal of high quality digitised material available, from e-books and e-journals to Open Access articles in UCL’s institutional respository and UCL Press, which mean that you can sidestep copying issues altogether. Linking to a resource in an online reading list using ReadingLists@UCL will give easy access for your students, whilst avoiding headaches about licensing for you.  You don’t need a licence or permission to link to legitimate or subscribed resources.

For more information please don’t hesitate to get in touch with the TLS team!

Regulations permitting Extended Collective Licensing (ECL) are set to become law on 1^st October. ECL is seen as a solution to the problem of gaining copyright permission for mass digitization projects, through which, for example, a library hopes to digitise a significant collection in order to make it more readily available via a web site. A proportion of the collection is known to be still in copyright and the process of item by item rights clearance can be prohibitively expensive and time consuming. Rights owners are sometimes unresponsive.

The ECL solution enables collecting societies (such as the Copyright Licensing Agency) to apply to the Government to run an ECL scheme which enables them to licence the use of works, the copyright in which belongs to non members of the collecting society. The collecting society must have a well established presence in licensing the relevant type of copyright material in order to qualify.

The scheme, if approved, will enable the library to pay a licence fee to cover its digitisation of a large number of works. The rights owners affected would be able to benefit from fees distributed by the collecting society (just as the members benefit currently). They would also be able to take their works out of the scheme if they objected.

The licences which can be applied for under scheme seem to be of limited duration, which is likely to be problematic for libraries investing in large scale digitisation. It remains to be seen, also, how promptly collecting societies will come forward to take advantage of the new arrangements.

It is interesting that some of the new copyright exceptions have been extended to benefit Museums specifically:

Preservation Copies
A good example is the updated Section 42 of the Copyright Designs and Patents Act 1988 (CDPA) which permits libraries, archives and museums to reproduce copyright works for purposes of replacement and preservation. Not only does this exception now cover museums, it has also has also been widened to encompass copying of works in any format. This means for example that deteriorating film stock and fading photographs can now be reproduced (digitised) for preservation.
Dedicated Terminals
The other prominent example of the inclusion of museums is an entirely new exception in Section 40B of CDPA (new to UK  legislation that is – it is drawn from the EU Copyright Directive 2001/29/EC). This permits libraries, archives, museums and educational establishments to make a copyright work available on a dedicated terminal to members of the public for purposes of research and private study. Interesting that this is not limited to “non commercial” research, but then it does not permit copying.
Although not explicit in the wording of the new exception, the IP Minister, Lord Younger has made it clear that the primary purpose is to improve the availability of digitised copies of older copyright material which may be fragile and otherwise inaccessible to the public.
There is ongoing litigation in Germany involving a University which sought to rely on the underlying exception in EU legislation to justify making a recently published book available via “dedicated terminals” (Schulze v. Darmstadt). Various issues have been referred to the European Court of Justice (reference C-117/13). The outcome will be interesting.

The Government has published its response to the consultation exercise on Extended Collective Licensing. ECL is the solution offered by the Intellectual Property Office to the copyright issues which prevent large scale digitisation projects in libraries, archives and museums. These are projects involving so many works that it would be impractical to carry out a “diligent search” in an attempt to identify the rights holder of each item. The solution would enable collective rights organisations such as the Copyright Licensing Agency to sell licences for large scale digitisation of works which fall within their area. This is achieved by allowing those organisations to licence the works of rights owners who are not actually their members.

There is of potential interest to any library contemplating a large scale digitisation project to make its collection more accessible, particularly if that collection includes a large number of orphan works. The Government aims to have the new regulations in force by 1st October 2014. The proposed 5 year initial limit on licences is likely to be a big issue.