John Halligan (Waterford, Independent) | Oireachtas source

As I have said on a number of occasions in the House and in the Dáil, the Bill is a technical piece of the legislation, the purpose of which is to amend and update the copyright and other intellectual property law, to modernise it for the digital age and to enable rightholders to better protect their intellectual property rights in the courts.

Section 14 of the Bill deletes section 57 of the Copyright and Related Rights Act 2000. This is hereafter referred to as the CRRA and replaces it with a section 57, as well as additional sections 57A and 57C, all of which introduce a range of new exceptions for education, teaching and scientific research. The new provisions are intended to expand to the full extent the education exceptions allowed by the EU Information Society directive.Following engagement with stakeholders since the publication of the Bill and in its continued passage through the Houses, it has been identified that certain safeguards contained in section 57 of the Copyright and Related Rights Act were inadvertently removed. Senators may have been briefed on this issue. The safeguards were inadvertently removed during the drafting process. As I signalled to the House on Committee Stage, I propose to reinstate the safeguards by amending section 14 and Schedule 1 to the Bill and creating a new section that will amend section 173 of Copyright and Related Rights Act. The changes to section 14 as proposed in amendment No. 3 are section 57(1) provides that it is not an infringement for an educational establishment to make a copy of a work, or communication of a work, for the sole purpose of illustration for education, teaching or scientific research, or for an educational establishment to reproduce a work in order to display it.

Section 57(2) provides that the educational exceptions are subject to the three-step test under the Berne Convention for the Protection of Literacy and Artistic Works. The three-step test provides that exceptions to copyright shall only apply if they are for non-commercial purposes, justified for the purpose to be achieved and accommodated by a sufficient acknowledgement. This test is generally understood to apply to all copyright exceptions in the Copyright and Related Rights Act, but it is not explicitly stated in respect of the educational exceptions. Therefore, it was considered to be a useful addition for the purposes of clarity, specifically in the case of the educational exceptions in section 14 of the Bill.

Section 57(3) reinstates the existing provision about which we spoke previously that no more than 5% of a work may be copied in any calendar year in order to avail of the educational exceptions, thus protecting the integrity of the copyrighted work.

Section 57(4) reinstates the existing provision that provides for the possibility of right holders taking infringement proceedings if a copy of a work is made under the educational exceptions provided for in section 57(1) and subsequently sold, rented, loaned or offered for same.

The deletion of lines 1 to 3, inclusive, in Schedule 1 to the Bill is necessary to remove the reference to education from the fair dealing provision for research contained in section 50 of the Copyright and Related Rights Act. The inclusion of education in these three specific instances expands the educational exceptions far beyond what currently applies and would unreasonably prejudice the rights of right holders. Amendment No. 15 deletes the table as it currently appears in Schedule 1 to the Bill and replaces it with a new table minus the information in lines of 1 to 3, inclusive.

A further technical amendment is required to section 57C(1) of the Bill which lists a number of sections of the Copyright and Related Rights Act to which the educational exceptions do not apply because of the existence of licensing schemes that must be used instead of the exceptions. An amendment listed as amendment No. 4 is required to delete the reference to the phantom section 50A as it was not created in the Bill. In addition, the reference to section 50 should also be deleted as it is a consequential amendment as a result of the deletion of the specific references to education from the fair dealing provision for research contained in section 50 of the Copyright and Related Rights Act.

As a result of the creation of section 57C related to licensing schemes for educational establishments, it is necessary to make a consequential amendment in section 173 of the Copyright and Related Rights Act to change the reference for the requirement for licences from section 57 to section 57C. Amendment No. 6 proposes to amend section 173 of the Copyright and Related Rights Act. This is necessary to avoid any uncertainty for schools and other educational establishments on the continued need to obtain licences for the use of copyright protected works to protect the rights of authors, publishers and education books.