Education Licensing Working Group

The group is working with the Copyright Hub to support clarity, reduced bureaucracy and transparency in copyright licensing for schools, colleges and universities.

The Group is taking forward the work commenced following publication of the report by Richard Hooper and Ros Lynch, who had been appointed by the Government to investigate the feasibility of establishing a Digital Copyright Exchange – now the Copyright Hub – as recommended in the Hargreaves report on modernising copyright law. Their report, Copyright Works: Streamlining copyright licensing for the digital age, identified a number of difficulties reported by educational establishments in their obtaining of licences to use copyright content, noting that collecting societies and other licensing bodies were already responding to reduce the problems.

Through the course of 2013 an Education Workstream comprising representatives of the education sector and licensing bodies worked on those issues under the auspices of the Copyright Licensing Steering Group. It published its report in September 2013 on the progress that had been made and on further tasks that needed to be tackled. This work is now being taken forward by the Education Licensing Working Group. A list of the Group’s members and the minutes of its bi-monthly meetings can accessed via the links on this page.

The positive developments that have taken place during the past year include the move to uniform start dates for licences issued by collective management organisations to schools and to the further and higher education sectors respectively, which reduces the burdens on administrators within individual establishments.

In addition the conclusion of licence payment agreements between each of six copyright licensing bodies and the Department for Education on behalf of state-funded schools in England, has been welcomed in reducing the administration involved in putting in place over 100,000 licences which operate for the benefit of the relevant schools. A further agreement has recently been entered into with the Department for Education in Scotland for the benefit of schools in Scotland.