The European Communities, with their sovereign rights in special areas, disrupt the trend toward exclusive territorial rights of the national states and, in this way, reflect a new development in international law.

The three European Communities and their institutions There are three European Communities:

– the European Coal and Steel Community (ECSC), established by the Treaty of Paris, of 18 April 1951,

– the European Economic Community (EEC, “Common Market”), and

– the European Atomic Energy Community (EURATOM), the two latter both established by the Treaties of Rome, of 25 March 1957.

The proper way to begin, when talking to you on the activities of the European Communities in the field of approximation of national laws and legislation for the purpose of freeing movements of persons, goods, capital and services from various obstacles, would be for me to simply refer to the Treaty establishing the EEC and to inquire how legislative provisions are to be harmonised in compliance with the aims of the founders of the Community and of the signatories of the Treaty.

Ladies and Gentlemen, I am glad to have the opportunity of speaking to you here. Since I am concerned with international law, especially with the law of the European Communities and the European Council, I am therefore very interested in your activity. What would we do without law libraries? That work is indispensible to us in science and in practice.

Publications of the EC ought to be published by the Office for Official Publications of the EC (henceforth cited as “Office”) in Luxembourg. However, the five institutions which are jointly responsible for the Office (European Parliament, Council, Commission, Court of Justice, Economic and Social Committee) also publish documents and papers themselves. Moreover, a clearly defined publication policy does not exist neither in the Office nor in the institutions. These two factors, the variety of publishers and the lack of concept, make it particularly difficult to know what has been published in the EC, all the more for persons from non-member countries. The “Catalogue of the publications of the European Communities Institutions 1972–1973” (476 pages) does not provide complete information on the publications, although this catalogue is, of course, helpful. The enormous bulk of paper issued by the EC is partly for sale, partly for distribution free of charge, only a part of the documents are printed, others are duplicated typescripts; a lot of paper is brought out for the information of the general public, whereas legal and scientific texts are only of interest for a smaller number of persons. For a librarian in charge of getting adequate information on the EC, I should like to propose the acquisition of the following minimum set of EC publications:

Primary legislation (foundation treaties),

Official Journal (L and C),

Official Journal– Annex (Debates of the European Parliament),

Working documents of the European Parliament,

Reports of Cases before the Court,

General Reports on the Activities of the EC,

Bulletin of the EC and Supplement thereto.

In view of some of the discussions which I listened to yesterday, I feel I should start by making a distinction between publishing and printing. These are two very different operations, but the distinction is often lost upon the layman. Indeed, the top management in the European Communities apparently frequently confuses the two.

The library and documentation services of the Commission are as varied as one would expect them to be in an intergovernmental institution of this kind. Through a mixed process of chance and intent they have grown into a collection of organisms whose related and sometimes overlapping functions are not always clear to Commission officials themselves, let alone to outsiders.

By way of introduction I would like to define the problems particular to the European Parliament, problems which arise in part because of its very nature. It is, in fact, a very different animal from the national parliaments with which we are acquainted. It has a number of specific problems which arise from the very fact that it is different. Perhaps the most important of these is that the Members of the European Parlimant are all members of their own parliaments in the first place: this is a pre-condition before they can come to the European Parliament and means that on top of a very full job of work in their own parliaments, they are expected to find something in excess of 100 extra days in every year to attend meetings of the European Parliament and its committees. Everyone who has talked to his own member of Parliament will, no doubt, have been told “I haven't got a minute to spare. I haven't the time to do anything extra. I can't do half the things I want to do.” If you then tell him “Well, I'm sorry, but you've got to find 100 days,” you will realise the size of the problem we are facing. For the parliamentarian this must mean that he has much less time for his preparatory meetings, much less time for background reading, much less time for writing reports, and must inevitably place much more reliance on the services which the permanent secretariat can provide. This is the first problem.

Information and documentation about law are of primary importance for the development of the new legal order created by the European Communities. This might be true in any legal order but it has proved to be particularly decisive for Community law.

Catalogues are the essential element of every library. The following description of the main features of the documentation system maintained by the Library of the German Bundestag and of the most important principles of its catalogues will, more than anything else, show that they differ considerably from the forms of library documentation generally known in Germany. Though it would be particularly interesting to do so here, limitations of space unfortunately prevent a theoretical discussion of cataloguing principles in any detail. However, at this point it is important to stress that in view of the manifold requirements to be met by a modern library documentation and information system, the catalogues and documentation system of the Bundestag Library have proved themselves quite valuable.

Georg Leistner's short monograph on the publication of appellate judicial decisions in Western Europe undoubtedly deserves more attention than it seems to have received in the fifteen months or so since its appearance in late 1975. In a careful and methodical way it describes the publication process of appellate decisions in ten major Western European countries, the percentage of decisions selected for publication, and the major selection criteria prevailing in the respective countries. In this sense, Leistner's work achieves the status of a highly useful reference source on law reporting in Western Europe and fills in the void left open by the various legal bibliographies of Western Europe on the one hand and description of their judicial systems on the other (e. g., Council of Europe. Judicial Organization in Europe. London: Morgan-Grampian Ltd., 1975) which, as a rule, do not address themselves to these questions. Furthermore, as the topic of law reporting has hitherto been more or less neglected in Europe, Leistner may rightly be considered a pioneer in this area, and his work enjoys the qualities of original research extending beyond mere descriptive reporting. In any event, there is just too much valuable information in this work to allow it to fade into obscurity.

Title 17 of the United States Code (Copyright Act of 1909) was amended in its entirety by Public Law 94–553 (90 Stat. 2541), on October 19, 1976. The new Statute specifies that, with particular exceptions, its provisions are to enter into force on January 1, 1978. Until then, the Copyright Act of 1909, as amended, remains in force. As a result, any cause of action in copyright arising before December 31, 1977 will be governed by the 1909 law. There is a three-year statute of limitations in which such an action may be brought. Hence, the 1909 law can be applicable in these cases until 1981.