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A public lending right (PLR) is a program intended to either compensate authors for the potential loss of sales from their works being available in public libraries [1] or as a governmental support of the arts, through support of works available in public libraries, such as books, music and artwork.
Thirty-five countries have a PLR program, [2] and others are considering adopting one. Canada, the United Kingdom, Ireland, all the Scandinavian countries, Germany, Austria, Belgium, the Netherlands, Israel, Australia, Malta and New Zealand currently have PLR programmes. There is ongoing[ when? ] debate in France about implementing one. There is also a move towards having a Europe-wide PLR programme administered by the European Union.
In the United States the Authors Guild began a campaign in support of the PLR in 2018. [3]
The first PLR programme was initiated in Denmark in 1941. [4] However, it was not properly implemented until 1946 due to World War II. [5] The idea spread slowly from country to country and many nations' PLR programs are quite recent developments.
PLR programmes vary from country to country. [6] Some, like Germany and the Netherlands, have linked PLR to copyright legislation and have made libraries liable to pay authors for every book in their collection. [7] Other countries do not connect PLR to copyright.[ clarification needed ]
In Denmark, the current programme is considered a type of governmental support of the arts, not reimbursement of potential lost sales. [8] Types of works supported are books, music, and visual artworks, created and published in Denmark, and available in public and school libraries.
In the UK, authors Brigid Brophy and Maureen Duffy spearheaded a campaign to achieve a public lending right, following on from John Brophy's original notion in the 1950s of 'The Brophy Penny'.[ citation needed ] The UK PLR scheme was established with the Public Lending Right Act 1979 which was further expanded in 1982. It was incorporated into the British Library in 2013. [9]
How amounts of payment are determined also varies from country to country. For example, in the UK, pay is based on how many times a book has been taken out of a library, while in Canada, the system of payment is based on whether a library owns a book or not.
The amount of payments is also variable. The amount any one author can receive is never very considerable. In the United Kingdom authors are paid on a per-loan basis calculated from a representative sample of libraries. [9] The rate in 2019 was 8.52 pence per individual loan. [10] In Canada, annual payment is based on the following equation:
where the number of libraries is counted from a national sample (number of copies in each library is irrelevant); share is the percentage contribution to the work (e.g. for books with co-authors, illustrators, translators, or narrators); and the time adjustment is 100% for the first 5 years, decreasing to 50% after 16 years, and is 0% after 25 years. The formula is applied to each title registered by the contributor. As of 2024 [update] , there is a maximum of C$4,500 that any one person can receive in a year. [11]
Different countries also have differing eligibility criteria. In most nations only published works are accepted, government publications are rarely counted, nor are bibliographies or dictionaries.[ citation needed ] Some PLR services are mandated solely to fund literary works of fiction, and some such as Norway, have a sliding scale paying far less to non-fiction works.[ citation needed ] Many nations also exclude scholarly and academic texts.
Within the European Union, the public lending right is regulated since November 1992 by directive 92/100/EEC on rental right and lending right. A report in 2002 from the European Commission [12] pointed out that many member countries had failed to implement this directive correctly.
The PLR directive has met with resistance from the side of the International Federation of Library Associations and Institutions (IFLA). The IFLA has stated that the principles of 'lending right' can jeopardize free access to the services of publicly accessible libraries, which is the citizen's human right. [13] The PLR directive and its implementation in public libraries is rejected by a number of European authors, including Nobel Laureates Dario Fo and José Saramago. [14] Conversely, more than 3000 authors signed a petition opposing PLR cuts in the UK in 2010. [15] [16]
A copyright is a type of intellectual property that gives the creator of an original work, or another right holder, the exclusive and legally secured right to copy, distribute, adapt, display, and perform a creative work, usually for a limited time. The creative work may be in a literary, artistic, educational, or musical form. Copyright is intended to protect the original expression of an idea in the form of a creative work, but not the idea itself. A copyright is subject to limitations based on public interest considerations, such as the fair use doctrine in the United States.
The World Intellectual Property Organization Copyright Treaty is an international treaty on copyright law adopted by the member states of the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) in 1996. It provides additional protections for copyright to respond to advances in information technology since the formation of previous copyright treaties before it. As of August 2023, the treaty has 115 contracting parties. The WCT and WIPO Performances and Phonograms Treaty, are together termed WIPO "internet treaties".
The copyright law of the European Union is the copyright law applicable within the European Union. Copyright law is largely harmonized in the Union, although country to country differences exist. The body of law was implemented in the EU through a number of directives, which the member states need to enact into their national law. The main copyright directives are the Copyright Term Directive, the Information Society Directive and the Directive on Copyright in the Digital Single Market. Copyright in the Union is furthermore dependent on international conventions to which the European Union or their member states are part of, such as TRIPS Agreement or the Berne Convention.
The Canada Council for the Arts, commonly called the Canada Council, is a Crown corporation established in 1957 as an arts council of the Government of Canada. It is Canada's public arts funder, with a mandate to foster and promote the study and enjoyment of, and the production of works in, the arts.
Brigid Antonia Brophy, was a British author, literary critic and polemicist. She was an influential campaigner who agitated for many types of social reform, including homosexual parity, vegetarianism, humanism, and animal rights. Brophy appeared frequently on television and in the newspapers of the 1960s and 1970s, making her prominent both in literary circles and on the wider cultural scene. Her public reputation as an intellectual woman meant she was both revered and feared. Her oeuvre comprises both fiction and non-fiction, displaying the impressive range of Brophy's erudition and interests. All her work is suffused with her stylish crispness and verve.
Copyright in the Netherlands is governed by the Dutch Copyright Law, copyright is the exclusive right of the author of a work of literature or artistic work to publish and copy such work.
The International Federation of Library Associations and Institutions (IFLA) is an international body representing the interests of people who rely on libraries and information professionals. A non-governmental, not-for-profit organization, IFLA was founded in Scotland in 1927 with headquarters at the National Library of the Netherlands in The Hague. IFLA sponsors the annual IFLA World Library and Information Congress, promoting access to information, ideas, and works of imagination for social, educational, cultural, democratic, and economic empowerment. IFLA also produces several publications, including IFLA Journal.
The Authors' Licensing and Collecting Society (ALCS) is a British organisation that works to ensure that writers are fairly compensated for any of their works that are copied, broadcast or recorded. It has operated in the United Kingdom since 1977. From that year to 2016, the ALCS distributed over £450 million to authors, and at the end of 2016 had in excess of 90,000 members.
The Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, also known as the CDPA, is an Act of the Parliament of the United Kingdom that received royal assent on 15 November 1988. It reformulates almost completely the statutory basis of copyright law in the United Kingdom, which had, until then, been governed by the Copyright Act 1956 (c. 74). It also creates an unregistered design right, and contains a number of modifications to the law of the United Kingdom on Registered Designs and patents.
In Romania, copyright law is defined by the Law No. 8/1996 on authors rights and related rights, as republished in 2018, which currently implements European copyright law (directives). Copyright is acquired irrespective of formalities, and normally belongs to the natural person/s who created the protected work. A protected work is created if the work is the author's own intellectual creation. Like other EU civil law jurisdictions, Romanian copyright law recognises two types of rights: moral rights and patrimonial rights.
In copyright law, related rights are the rights of a creative work not connected with the work's actual author. It is used in opposition to the term "authors' rights". Neighbouring rights is a more literal translation of the original French droits voisins. Both authors' rights and related rights are copyrights in the sense of English or U.S. law.
Directive 92/100/EEC is a European Union directive in the field of copyright law, made under the internal market provisions of the Treaty of Rome. It creates a "rental and lending right" as a part of copyright protection, and sets out minimum standards of protection for the related rights of performers, phonogram and film producers and broadcasting organizations.
The Berne Convention for the Protection of Literary and Artistic Works, usually known as the Berne Convention, was an international assembly held in 1886 in the Swiss city of Berne by ten European countries with the goal of agreeing on a set of legal principles for the protection of original work. They drafted and adopted a multi-party contract containing agreements for a uniform, border-crossing system that became known under the same name. Its rules have been updated many times since then. The treaty provides authors, musicians, poets, painters, and other creators with the means to control how their works are used, by whom, and on what terms. In some jurisdictions these type of rights are referred to as copyright; on the European continent they are generally referred to as author' rights or makerright.
The Agreement on Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS) is an international legal agreement between all the member nations of the World Trade Organization (WTO). It establishes minimum standards for the regulation by national governments of different forms of intellectual property (IP) as applied to nationals of other WTO member nations. TRIPS was negotiated at the end of the Uruguay Round of the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) between 1989 and 1990 and is administered by the WTO.
The Copyright and Information Society Directive 2001 is a directive in European Union law that was enacted to implement the WIPO Copyright Treaty and to harmonise aspects of copyright law across Europe, such as copyright exceptions. The directive was first enacted in 2001 under the internal market provisions of the Treaty of Rome.
Under the law of the United Kingdom, a copyright is an intangible property right subsisting in certain qualifying subject matter. Copyright law is governed by the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, as amended from time to time. As a result of increasing legal integration and harmonisation throughout the European Union a complete picture of the law can only be acquired through recourse to EU jurisprudence, although this is likely to change by the expiration of the Brexit transition period on 31 December 2020, the UK has left the EU on 31 January 2020. On 12 September 2018, the European Parliament approved new copyright rules to help secure the rights of writers and musicians.
Limitations and exceptions to copyright are provisions, in local copyright law or the Berne Convention, which allow for copyrighted works to be used without a license from the copyright owner.
Controlled digital lending (CDL) is a model by which libraries digitize materials in their collection and make them available for lending. It is based on interpretations of the United States copyright principles of fair use and copyright exhaustion.
The European Bureau of Library, Information and Documentation Associations (EBLIDA) is an independent association of European library, information, and documentation associations and institutions. Created in 1992, EBLIDA was born out of a perceived long-standing need for European libraries to cooperate on common issues they faced, particularly those brought by a lack of integration of libraries into European policies and strategies. EBLIDA focuses primarily on European library legislation, the impact of the library on society, and Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) in Europe. It is composed of a Council of members, an Executive Committee, a Secretariat, and optional bodies such as Standing Committees and Expert Groups. It is also represented by an elected President and appointed Director. As of March 2023, EBLIDA has 122 members from all European Union countries, representing approximately 70,000 individual libraries and 100 million library users across Europe.