(7) In accordance with the principles of subsidiarity and proportionality as set out in Article 5 of the Treaty, the objectives of this Directive, namely to set out broad principles for the licensing of railway undertakings and the mutual recognition of such licences throughout the Community, cannot be sufficiently achieved by the Member States on account of the manifestly international dimension of issuing such licences and can therefore, by reason of its trans-national implications, be better achieved by the Community. This Directive does not go beyond what is necessary to achieve those objectives.

Unlike the solution adopted in the Luxembourg Convention, which provides (Article 45) that national legislations should be applicable to compulsory licences for a Community patent, this proposal lists, with a view to ensuring greater legal certainty, the grounds on which such licences can be granted.

Whereas, having regard to the principle of subsidiarity and in order to ensure the requisite uniformity and transparency, it is appropriate that the Community lay down the broad principles of such a licensing system, leaving to Member States the responsibility for the granting and the administration of licences;

For larger networks, such as that currently foreseen for one of the large car-industries in the Community, this could amount to well over 5000 individual applications for licences.

I would say that our organization does not envision a future when all of the access to copyrighted materials will be provided either through large licences like the kind that we enter into now or, alternatively, that it will be all covered under compensation through Access Copyright or through fair-dealing provisions.

- 2 - The increasing economic importance of non-patented technical information, commonly termed "know-how", and the large number of agreements currently being concluded by industry solely for the exploitation of such information (so-called "straight" or "pure" know-how licensing agreements) make it necessary to provide greater legal certainty with regard to the status of such agreements under the competition rules.