Transplantation of an Extended Collective Licensing System – Lessons from Denmark

Extended collective licensing (ECL) has been employed in the Nordic countries for more than fifty years with great success and social benefits. Given its success in terms of royalty collection and dispute resolution, several countries outside Scandinavia intend to transplant this regime. Based on a study of the origin and subsequent development of the ECL regime in the Nordic countries, and its practical implementation in Denmark, the author of this article advises that for those countries wishing to adopt this system the legislation on ECL provisions should be carefully modeled in order to harmonize with the major international copyright treaties. In addition, the characteristics of the regime should remain largely unchanged, but slight modification for further clarification is also needed.