European IPR Helpdesk

Case Study
Copyright management and Creative Commons in FP7
The European IPR Helpdesk is managed by the European Commission’s Executive Agency for Competitiveness and Innovation
(EACI), with policy guidance provided by the European Commission’s Enterprise & Industry Directorate-General. The positions
expressed are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the European Commission.

Project details

Project acronym: Anonymous

Business sector: Information and communications technology

EU funding programme: Seventh Framework Programme

1. Background

Within the framework of a Seventh Framework Programme (FP7), a project

involving a consortium of twelve partner organisations from five countries,
between SMEs and research organisations, has been launched with the objective
to create a platform to provide the Internet community with innovative
experiments and tools facilitating the development of future Internet
technologies.

The project intends to implement the next steps in the field by successfully
sharing across the community borders and offering openness for future Internet
extensions of use.

With this principle of openness in mind, most reports that are deliverable in this
project are public. These deliverables are therefore intended to be widely
disseminated outside the project, namely through the project’s website,
guaranteeing that knowledge resulting from the project is shared with the
community. However, during the implementation of the project some partners
expressed concerns with this dissemination strategy, since they believed that
making the reports available to everyone via the website would harm their
copyright in those deliverables, which in their understanding must be protected.

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IPR
Helpdesk
2. Dissemination and copyright protection

In FP7, deliverables must be labelled according to their confidentiality level. The

level of confidentiality differs depending on the people to whom the deliverables
can be disseminated. The following labels are used:

 PU = Public
 PP = Restricted to other programme participants (including the
Commission Services)
 RE = Restricted to a group specified by the consortium (including the
Commission Services)
 CO = Confidential, only for members of the consortium (including the
Commission Services)

The aim of labelling deliverables as "PU" or "Public" in this context is therefore to

make clear between the participants and the European Commission that there
are no restrictions on the people to whom the deliverable can be disseminated.
However, this does not mean that in a public deliverable there are no intellectual
property rights, particularly copyright. In fact, these are two different matters
and the fact that the consortium has labelled a deliverable as public does not
mean that the owner of the deliverable waives its copyright rights. The same
principle applies to reports and other works made available on the internet.

In the European Union, copyright has the special characteristic of being an

automatic right, namely that there is no need to seek registration. Copyright
arises with the creation of the work, provided that the work is original.
Consequently, once a deliverable is written, it is automatically protected by
copyright as long as it is considered original. This special characteristic of
copyright has impact at several levels.

One of the consequences is that there is no need to seek registration for

copyright. Moreover, copyright notices are not mandatory and do not trigger
copyright protection. They are nevertheless very useful, but for other reasons. In
fact, these notices make clear to others that the owner is claiming copyright in
the work, which can help to prevent others from copying the work and,
depending on the country, can have an impact in court proceedings. For this
reason, in the project, the partners have implemented the practice of adding in
all deliverables a copyright notice, which follows the common practice: © [name
of copyright owner], [year of creation].

3. Copyright and Creative Commons licences

Having in mind the wide dissemination approach of this project, the partners also
considered licensing the reports under Creative Commons. The Creative
Commons initiative is not incompatible with copyright and on the contrary is
based on the existence of copyright protection, since it allows the work to be
licensed to others interested in using the material. The great benefit of using the
Creative Commons licences relates to the fact that it makes licensing much
easier, since interested people can simply use the ready-made licences and

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attach them automatically to the work. The Creative Commons licences therefore
help save time, without neglecting legal certainty.

In the present case the partners agreed to use licence 3.0, allowing others to
copy, distribute and transmit the deliverable, but under the conditions that the
deliverable is attributed to the owner of the copyright, used for non-commercial
purposes and not used to create derivative works. In accordance with the
guidelines of the Creative Commons initiative, the partners followed the best
practices suggested for the copyright statement.

4. Lessons learned and suggestions

 Wide dissemination and copyright protection are not incompatible.

 Using copyright notices is best practice, even though it does not trigger
copyright protection.

 The Creative Commons initiative is built on copyright.