The Copyright Network group aims to consider information law (primarily copyright, including text and data mining, preservation, e-lending and cross-border cooperation, data protection law, privacy law and mandatory/legal deposit law) as it affects libraries, and to work to ensure changes in legislation, interpretation and best practices reflect the changing needs of libraries and their users.
The network group will facilitate knowledge and information exchange, network-building and professional support in relation to legal matters of relevance to national libraries. The focus will cover legislation and case law, as well as softer legal aspects including best practices, codes of conduct, contractual issues and competition among others. The approach should be one of the practitioners, i.e. hands on aspects of legal matters such as the making available of the library corpus and especially cross-border and legal matters relevant to big data such as AI/TDM.
The Network group shall monitor changes in the law, e.g. legislation and case law, foremost copyright, data protection, privacy and legal deposit law but also other areas of the law relevant for national libraries and cooperate on establishing best practices to:
Information on legal matters presented by CENL librarians’ point of view should be published on the CENL website (memos and briefing documents). Additionally, in order to make legal information more widely accessible, meetings, seminars and conferences shall be created with the objective of strengthening the community.
Chair: Maja Bogataj Jančič – Founder and head of the Intellectual Property Institute, a private research and consulting institution. Moreover, she is the author of many publications in the field of intellectual property and co-author of various books regarding the internet and intellectual property law. Maja is in charge of the project Creative Commons Slovenia and since 2019 she is Representative and Legal Lead of the Slovenian Chapter in the Creative Commons Global Network. She is also a member of the Communia association that advocates the expansion of the public domain and the increased access to and reuse of culture and knowledge.
Treasurer: Fredric Lemmers – Head of Digitisation Services at the Royal Library of Belgium since 2011. His experience in the field of digitisation projects funded on the Belgium federal level and on the European level, as well as network projects realised in cooperation with universities and nonprofit associations (ASBL-VZW).
Secretary: Matthew Lambert – Head of Copyright, Policy and Assurances at the British Library. Matthew has a masters in intellectual property law and is a qualified freedom of information practitioner. He has spect the last 15 years working in he copyright and licensing role and for the last four years has worked at the British Library providing copyright expertise and training across all the Library’s activities.
