BNF notice

In February 2012, the Bibliothèque Nationale de France (BnF) sent a request for an opinion concerning the presence of technological protection measures (TPMs) on documents it receives as part of its legal deposit. As part of its legal deposit, BnF benefits from reproduction exceptions for the purposes of collection, preservation and on-site browsing, in application of the French Heritage Code.

Certain technological protection measures present on the works would hinder, or even render impossible, the reproduction of the documents concerned, and would also limit the installation of the documents on the browsing stations made available by BnF, despite the provisions of the French Heritage Code intended to prevent such limitations.

In order to obtain informed information on the situation described by BNF, the Haute Autorité met with a number of software and multimedia developers and publishers to gain a better understanding of any obstacles to compliance with legal deposit obligations. In its notice issued on January 30, 2013, the supreme authority for the distribution and protection of intellectual property on internet (Hadopi) recommended modifying the legal deposit regime to enable BnF to have an unprotected version of digital documents, which implies a broader reflection on the scope and modalities of legal deposit of digital documents.