The pilot project was a joint initiative of ELAN e.V., the University of Osnabrück, and VG Wort, carried out during the winter semester 2014/2015 at the University of Osnabrück.

The background of the project is a 2013 ruling by the German Federal Court of Justice (BGH), which addressed how compensation should be provided for materials made available for teaching via password-protected learning platforms such as Stud.IP. According to § 52a of the German Copyright Act (UrhG), teaching staff are permitted to make certain “published parts of a work, works of minor length, and individual articles from newspapers or journals publicly accessible exclusively to a specifically defined group of people for their own scholarly research […].”

However, under copyright law a reasonable remuneration must be paid for this usage. This regulation was introduced into the UrhG in 2003. The legislator intended to safeguard the legitimate interests of science and education, enable the use of new communication and learning formats, and ensure the international competitiveness of German universities.

Although the regulation was originally intended for so-called “electronic course reserves,” it today forms the legal foundation for using excerpts from copyrighted sources in many different areas and didactic concepts of university teaching.

During the legal dispute heard by the BGH, the federal states argued that remuneration should be based on regular evaluations of usage at representative universities and extrapolated nationwide. Based on this idea, a general agreement was concluded between the federal states and all copyright collecting societies, except for VG Wort. As the representative of authors and publishers, VG Wort insisted on an individual recording of the usage of each book excerpt, article, etc. In its ruling, the BGH concluded that such individual reporting to VG Wort is both appropriate and reasonable in terms of effort.