Michael Mabe, CEO of the International Association of Scientific, Technical & Medical Publishers (STM), has signed the Out of Commerce Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) in Brussels, enabled through a dialogue with libraries facilitated by the European Commission (EC). The MoU recognises that the right to authorise the use of an Out of Commerce work is vested in the copyright holder (authors and publishers) and that voluntary solutions involving collective management are the way forward.
The signing of the MoU was witnessed by Michel Barnier, EC Commissioner for Internal Market and Services. Representatives of libraries, publishers, authors, creators and representatives of authors, publishers and collective management organisations for text and image based works also signed the MoU. Mabe signed the MoU on behalf of STM members.
The MoU envisages cross-border EU-wide copyright clearance and access rules. Reproduction Rights Organisations, represented by The International Federation of Reproduction Rights Organisations (IFFRO), can clear rights EU-wide for both mandating rights-holders and for obscure rights-holders of infrequently used materials. The MoU is limited to books and journals (and embedded materials) and does not cover newspapers or audio-visual materials.
The European Bureau of Library Information, Documentation Association (EBLIDA), the Association of European Research Libraries (LIBER) and the Conference of European National Libraries are co-signatories of the MoU. The International Federation of Libraries and Archives (IFLA) is supporting the MoU for its European members.
The European Writers Council (EWC), the European Federation of Journalists (EFJ) and the European Visual Artists (EVA) for the authors and the Federation of European Publishers (FEP), the European Publishers' Council (EPC) and STM acknowledged the MoU as important step in the digitisation and making available to the public of Europe's cultural heritage.
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