Creativity Works! welcomes the concrete solutions resulting from the Licences for Europe dialogue. The process, initiated last February, shows a commitment by the European Commission, the industry and other stakeholders to promote market driven offers for accessing creative content in the digital age.

Licences for Europe was an important opportunity for all participants to share existing successful initiatives in Europe, and to develop new workable solutions to offer European consumers access to creative works in a flexible manner.

Online content offers are booming: today, Europeans have access to over 2 million e-book titles, over 30 million licensed songs, and over 3000 Video-on-Demand (VOD) services. As new business models and forms of delivery come online, the ability for content creators to license their work, and so be confident in advance of a fair return on their endeavours, will be vital to the stability and vitality of the market.

Licenses for Europe has also shown that increased cross-border availability is driven by consumer demand. The process illustrated the diversity of sectors and consumers in Europe as well as the need to foster business models and market-driven responses that support the production of creative content and cultural diversity in Europe. Against this background, Creativity Works! members participated constructively throughout the process to produce deliverables that ensure the creative economy can flourish for all involved, on- and offline.

• Publishers, together with authors and booksellers, have agreed to a joint roadmap to enhance cross-border access, interoperability and discoverability of e-books.
• The book sector supports initiatives such as the development of ePub – an open standard format for e-books with a wide range of interoperability and accessibility features.
• European publishers support the development of a “tool kit” for licensing, including micro-licensing in text and image works; they also support licensing models and technology platforms to facilitate text and data mining access to promote its efficient use for scientific research – for non-commercial research, licensing should be at no additional costs to the researchers or the subscribing institutions.
• In the music sector, national repertoire from across the EU is widely available thanks to digital music services – portability is already provided by online services when travelling or residing abroad, including downloading MP3 on any device, synchronising through cloud storage and streaming. And today a pledge was made by record companies and authors’ collecting societies to offer multi-territory ‘one click’ micro-licenses for small-scale use of music online.
• Consumers will be able to make use of a new webpage showcasing the legal offers available to watch sports content while abroad in Europe
• Film producers, directors and other audiovisual authors and film heritage institutions have worked together to produce voluntary procedures for facilitating the digitisation of, and access to European cinematographic heritage works, as well as boosting the interest of European citizens in them; they also recommend the use of internationally recognised standard audiovisual work identifiers, as well as the full interoperability of ISAN and EIDR systems of audiovisual work identifiers.

You can download the press statement in PDF here.