General Extended Collective Licence Adds Flexibility to Licensing – Experiences from the Nordic Countries

By Jukka Liedes and Tuomas Mattila[fn]* Jukka Liedes is Chairman of the Finnish Copyright Society and former Director of the Ministry of Education and Culture, responsible for various areas of cultural policy, cultural institutions, and national and international copyright policy. Tuomas Mattila (LL.D., M.Soc.Sc., MA, University of Helsinki) is a legal researcher and a copyright lawyer, working on the fields of intellectual property, AI and intangible culture. The authors thank Ms. Satu Sorvo, Information Specialist at the Special Copyright Library of the Finnish Copyright Society, for her valuable assistance in the preparation of this Article. This research has been supported by the Ministry of Education and Culture of Finland and the Finnish Copyright Society.*

1. Introduction

Extended collective licence (hereinafter “ECL”) is a legal construction developed originally in the Nordic countries to facilitate collective management of copyright and to protect the users of copyrighted works. The ECL mechanism has been in use in the five Nordic countries for more than 60 years.

The ECL represents, in a sense, one of the culmination points of the development of collective administration of copyright and related rights. Collective management of rights was developed for areas where there was need to license mass uses of large repertoires of protected works and other subject matter. The mass use of large repertoires of protected subject matter always involves a great number of rightholders.