A lot has been happening in the world of copyright and collective licensing since my last update. Important judicial decisions have been announced and legislative plans have been published in several key jurisdictions. At Copyright Clearance Center, we continue to monitor the copyright landscape as part of our mission to support copyright and licensing around the world.
In the United States the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) issued a memo last month that has sparked conversation and debate across the scholarly publishing ecosystem. The memo offers policy guidance to federal agencies to make publications and their supporting data resulting from federally funded research publicly accessible without an embargo beginning in 2026; to establish transparent procedures that ensure scientific integrity is maintained in public access policies; and to coordinate with OSTP to ensure equitable delivery of federally funded research results and data. The Scholarly Kitchen has run several posts that examine the memo and its implications; we welcome a conversation with you as you consider the impact to your organization.
In South Africa the long-running struggle over new copyright legislation recently entered a new, and possibly final, phase. The deeply controversial and polarizing Copyright Amendment Bill was passed in the National Assembly (NA) on September 1st. Because of the distinctive legislative procedures in South Africa, this does not mean the end of the road has been reached. The Bill will now be referred for “concurrence” to the National Council of Provinces (NCOP) and the NCOP is expected to discuss its process for handling the Bill. In principle, the Bill could be referred to the provincial legislatures, where it would be considered by a provincial committee, which may choose to hold public hearings. The Bill will then eventually be sent back to the NA. Opponents of the Bill, which include all major rightsholders’ groups, are busy deciding their next steps.
Australia has been a turbulent place for copyright in recent years and there continues to be much to monitor there. You may recall that in May this year, the Copyright Tribunal published its long-awaited decision regarding copyright fees payable by the thirty-nine members of Universities Australia for 2019–22. Some two months later, the universities filed an application with the Federal Court seeking judicial review of several aspects of the Copyright Tribunal’s decision. The application will be heard on 28 November 2022. It is not unusual for the Federal Court to reserve its decision in applications of this kind, so few are expecting to hear the outcome until 2023. In the meantime, the local RRO, Copyright Agency, is invoicing universities at the rate set by the Tribunal. The interim arrangements from 2019 will continue to apply. That means only roughly half the fees paid to Copyright Agency are available and funds held in escrow since 2019 will remain in escrow until the matter is finally resolved.
Also in Australia, the local RRO described as “disappointing” a decision made in July by the Copyright Tribunal in a different case that began back in 2017. The long-running dispute centered on what rate two media monitoring organizations, Isentia and Meltwater, should pay to use news publishers’ print and digital content in their services. Certain parts of an earlier (October 2021) decision made by the Tribunal had been challenged by the local RRO. As reported by Copyright Agency on its website in July, “The Full Federal Court heard this appeal in early May 2022 and the Court has reserved its judgement. In the meantime, Isentia and Meltwater operate on the basis of the Tribunal ordered licence terms which are a long way removed from the model we developed on behalf of members and rights holders.”
In the UK, rightsholder groups have been communicating their opposition to the government’s announcement in June that it intended “to introduce a new copyright and database exception which allows text and data mining for any purpose.” Stakeholders from the publishing industry have met with ministers and civil servants to register their concerns about the impacts such a wide-ranging exception would have on their businesses. We are monitoring the situation closely and liaising with our partners and rightsholders in the UK.
It was a pleasure to return to Japan in September after a long absence and to have the opportunity to review recent developments with all the local RROs, the Agency for Cultural Affairs, and others. The compulsory license scheme for educational and academic institutions introduced in 2020 has, as expected, been very widely adopted. The scheme was initially and temporarily introduced without rightsholder remuneration (because of the pandemic), but since 2021 the institutions have been paying for their licenses. The first distribution of royalties from the scheme, both to domestic rightsholders and foreign RROs such as CCC, is not expected until the middle of 2023. We continue to follow developments there very closely.
It’s always good to be able to report news of collective licensing spreading to new parts of the world. We learned via IFRRO that in Malta authors and publishers received royalties for the first time for the reproduction of their works in schools.