Copyright
What is Copyright ?
Copyright is commonly understood as a set of exclusive rights granted to the author or creator of an original work, including the right to copy (reproduce), distribute and adapt the work.
CEN and CENELEC Standards documents and other technical deliverables and publications are covered and protected by copyright.
How to play safe?
In case you are interested in obtaining the national version (implementation) of a European Standard document or in any other document distributed by CEN and CENELEC Members, please contact the sales department of the national standards body or electrotechnical committee in your country.
Failure to respect CEN and CENELEC copyright, and their national Members’ exploitation rights, by illegitimately copying (even partially), translating or distributing Standards documents or other CEN and CENELEC publications, results in breaking the law and in possible legal penalties.
In all cases that fall outside or go beyond the jurisdiction of a single country, you are strongly encouraged to request advice from the Legal Affairs department of the CEN and CENELEC Management Centre in Brussels.
Any such enquiries should be addressed to legal@cencenelec.eu
Illegal practices that fail to respect copyright may ultimately jeopardize the development of future standards by depriving standards organizations of financial income to cover the costs of their work!
More information on
CEN and CENELEC’s Members - the national standards organisations and national electrotechnical committees - enjoy, within their own territories, the full right to sell, reproduce, translate, and otherwise exploit the CEN and CENELEC copyrighted Standards documents & other technical deliverables and publications.
Therefore, the licensing terms regarding any reproduction, even partial, or any other form of exploitation of the copyrighted document in one of the CEN and CENELEC Members’ countries, must be agreed in advance with the concerned national standards organisation or electrotechnical committee.
Adoption & distribution of CEN and CENELEC documents by non-European standards organisations
CEN and CENELEC encourage the adoption of European Standards by national standards bodies in non-European countries. They therefore grant favourable conditions on domestic sales and distribution of those European standards that are adopted as national standards in non-European countries.
In cases where a national standards body in a non-European country wishes to publish and sell a CEN or CENELEC standard document without having adopted it as a national standard, CEN and CENELEC can offer such a possibility subject to the payment of appropriate royalties.
More information on these topics can be found in the CEN-CENELEC Guide 10 on “Guidelines for the distribution and sales of CEN/CENELEC publications”.
A standard document or other technical deliverable is normally developed by a team of experts participating in a Technical Committee or a Working Group. Considering that a standard document originates from the collective contribution of a group of “authors”, it is at the level of Technical Committees and Working Groups, where the standard is developed, that the assignment of copyright exploitation rights to CEN and CENELEC and their members takes place.
The CEN/CENELEC Internal Regulations – Part 2 (Clause 9) available on CEN BOSS and CENELEC BOSS provide guidance on the appropriate procedures through which experts, creating the content of a standard, assign the exploitation rights of their work to CEN and CENELEC and their respective members.
Watermark
European standards and other CEN-CENELEC publications are usually sold in electronic form as PDF or similar files, or in products containing European Standards or other CEN-CENELEC publications. Such documents sold in electronic form carry a watermark, which helps identify the correct licence. The watermark includes the name of the customer and the download date on each page of the standard.
These publications are, as a rule, duly watermarked by the national standards organisations who sell them.
Other digital rights
CEN and CENELEC Members may also apply, at their own discretion, additional Digital Right Management (DRM) controls to protect against unauthorized copying or sharing of European Standards.