The future of European legislation to decide whether United Kingdom universities have the right freely to copy digitally stored texts is in the balance this month, with European Union member states striving to break a deadlock over the EU's information technology copyright directive.
Senior officials of national governments are to meet in Brussels following the failure of council of ministers' talks on the internal market to agree on the proposal, which would protect digitally stored intellectual property.
Member states are split over whether copyright holders have to be compensated every time their material is copied, even if this is carried out by academic institutions and libraries. France, Belgium and Italy are taking a hard line, saying that copyright holders should always be compensated, while the United Kingdom, the Netherlands and Scandinavian countries are more liberal, allowing for free copying in certain circumstances.
As a result, compromise solutions have failed to attract enough support to give the directive a second reading in the council.
UK university libraries have been lobbying for the right to copy for free from digital texts, as they do with hard copy.
Paul Ayris, director of library services for University College London, said that the uncertainty over the law was delaying plans to exploit the internet and to digitise academic works as a means to widen library resources. "It has meant that people have not developed digital delivery to any great extent," he said. "It would be incredibly useful. On courses with 100 undergraduates, you wouldn't be able to buy 100 copies of a textbook, but you could provide access with digital copies."
The current Portuguese presidency of the EU wants to steer the proposal through the council before its term of office expires at the end of this month, as there is concern that its progress could be stalled for the rest of the year by the incoming presidency, France.
But there is doubt over whether this will happen. Toby Bainton, secretary of the Standing Conference of National and University Libraries, said: "I think it is on a knife-edge. All the pressure is to get this through this month. The window is pretty narrow."
He said that there was also a technical dispute surrounding encryption, with member states arguing over whether universities should be charged for allowing students to have access to material that had been scrambled by a publisher, even if a library had paid for software that could decode the text.
The publishing industry is also concerned, saying that a failure to agree the directive could seriously damage efforts to stamp out global internet piracy in its sector.
Publishers Association chief executive Ronnie Williams said that he was worried about the apparent hardening of positions over a directive that has been debated since 1997. "At the moment, this is a mess. There's an element of stunned shock. How did it come to this?" he said.
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