ILIAS: Effects of amendments to §52a Copyright Act (Urheberrechtsgesetz (UrhG))

Use of ILIAS teaching and learning platform as of 1 January 2017. Effects of amendments to §52a Copyright Act (Urheberrechtsgesetz (UrhG))

As of 1 January 2017, changes in the use of ILIAS as a teaching and learning platform will take effect.

Up until now, it has been possible to make newspaper articles and excerpts from books (“small parts of a work”) available in ILIAS to participants of the respective course in addition to own material. This possibility is governed by § 52a of the copyright act "Urheberrechtsgesetz", valid until 31 December 2016. The federal states have paid an annual lump sum for the use of material protected by copyright to the Verwertungsgesellschaft Wort (VG Wort), which in turn has disbursed these funds to the authors. VG Wort is an alliance of authors and publishers which administrates royalties from secondary use rights regarding texts.

To replace this provision, VG Wort and the Standing Conference of the Ministers of Education and Cultural Affairs of the Länder (Kultusministerkonferenz (KMK)) entered into a framework contract at the end of September 2016. Individual universities may accede independently to this framework contract should they decide to do so. The contract governs that in future all materials protected by copyright which are made available must be documented and reported individually. After use, bibliographical metadata must be recorded for each essay, each extract from a book etc. Apart from the fact that ILIAS is so far not technically equipped to do this – nor, by the way, are other teaching and learning platforms – this new rule means additional work for lecturers which is greatly underestimated by VG Wort.

The University of Konstanz is therefore unlikely to accede to the framework contract as of 1 January 2017 – subject to a decision to be made by the Senate of the University of Konstanz. The State Rectors’ Conference of Baden-Wuerttemberg (LRK) has issued this recommendation to its members. Similar recommendations have been made in a number of other federal states and the German Rectors’ Conference has expressed a similar view. This will presumably result in a considerable loss of income for VG Wort, so that there is hope of bringing VG Wort back to the negotiating table by not acceding to the contract. The universities’ aim is a return to lump sum payment in order to contain the bureaucracy to a major degree.

Should it become apparent that there will not be a transitional arrangement from 1 January 2017 onwards, we will notify you before Christmas of the procedure which will apply at the University of Konstanz as of January 2017.

Should you have any questions, please feel free to contact Petra Hätscher (petra.haetscher@uni-konstanz.de, Tel. 88-2800).

P.S.: By the way: All materials made available in ILIAS up until 31 December 2016 may continue to be used for teaching and study purposes