editorial tirant lo blanch
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS AND A SMALL INTRODUCTION
To begin with I have a confession to make: I do not really know why I am here
exactly, but anyway I think that the responsibility is not mine, or at least not only
mine. So I shall like to thank the real responsible.
In the first place I would like to thank CEDRO Spanish organization and specially her
head, Mrs Magdalena Vinent, and also Mr. Victoriano Colofón. Also I would like to
thank the OMPI and specially Mr Marco Manzano.
I will clarify that I am a lawyer but my real job in the last 20 years has been to
manage a publishing house (Editorial Tirant lo Blanch), so I will ask for your
indulgence if the legal concepts that I can use today are not very accurate. Anyway I
hope that my little experience can be interesting.
I would like to ask for your indulgence on my English too. To be honest, I’m a little
rusty in English right now.
Well, the reason of my presence here today is to explain the experiences of TIRANT
LO BLANCH in the Internet Market and with law rights in this field.
Tirant is a private enterprise that started like a small bookstore in Valencia 30 Years
ago. We continue growing like a specialized bookstore company. In 1987 (Nineteen
eighty seven) Tirant began to publish. At the beginning we published students Books,
but quickly we began to publish professional books too. Law has been always our
main activity.
But I would like to begin the lecture recalling the year 1998 (Nineteen ninety eight).
In that year the Spanish Market was shaped in this way:
1.-SITUATION OF SPANISH LAW MARKET IN
1998
There were two branches of law market, very well defined:
1.1. Paper
Paper was the traditional market, completely hegemonic all around but not in the
Legal acumulative information and in the Court Opinions acumulative information.
The Law paper market was divided into several mini markets that were:
- Practical books: Books adequate for attorneys
- Legal Books
- Students Books
- Law and Court Opinions in paper: This market met with a little resistance.
You could still find lawyers who say: "I shall never change my mind. I prefer to look
my legal information in these wonderful books...." Nevertheless it was a minority
1.2. Electronic Market
The CD Room was completely installed into the Accumulative legal information and
in the court Opinions information market
2.-TIRANT PUBLISING HOUSE IN 1998
Tirant was a small but relative strong publishing house specialized in Law Students Books
and in Law Practical Books, out of the electronic markets. We had a small but a
comfortable and solid position in the market
This was the composition of our sales.
60%
Students Books............60%
Practical Books............35%
Other Books..................8%
Subscription...................0%
50%
40%
30%
Students
Books
Practical
Books
20%
Another
Books
10%
Suscription
0%
In that year (1998) Internet began to appear in our quiet and placid world, with free law
websites ( ex: juridicas.com) that offered free information to the customs. These
Websites expected to make a profit on advertizing incomes. Also our thoughts made
us foresee that the kind of books we published would be seriously damaged by the
new emergent technology. The people would use different ways to get to law
information and therefore our natural market would be considerably reduced. Also the
CD/DVD would be, in our vision of market evolution , replaced by internet.
And, What could we do, a small publishing house like us with no presence at all in the
electronic markets ?
We had a problem, and maybe a chance too. So we began to think , making an
strategic plan.
3. STRATEGIC PLAN.-Our plan was based on
three simple ideas:

1) To increase our presence in those markets that could be resistent to the new
Technology, and therefore could permit us to work “as usual". In this sense Tirant
launched new collections in
Legal books (Legal texts, Cinema and law Forms) and developed other publishing
collections in different and new subjects: Linguistics, Religion, History, Economy,
Social assistance.

2) To maintain our traditional sales and markets, with special emphasis on the
students books. I always had the feeling that the market could be smaller in the future
but not disappear completely. If we resisted the transition we could get out with a
solid possition.

3) To "Attack" Electronic Market . It seemed to be a good idea. There was a new
possibility , nobody had started it and we were in a good financial situation . But the
problem was How.
Tirantonline (*)4 began like a project in 1999 ( February) and we signed our first
sell sale contract in 2002 ( September)
4. TIRANTONLINE. WHAT IS IT?
www.tirantonline.com
4.1. It is an Internet payment Database. The Publishing Idea was to make a product
with a Technology only developed for Internet. That implied to give up the big market
in that moment assumed by CD/DVD products . But it has the great advantage of
making your own investments (limited because we are a small company) in the way
you consider to be more profitable in the future. It supposed also to give up the
advertizing profits of the Internet free law pages.
4.2. It is a Database with high Technology, developed exclusively for Internet *(3), that
combines automatic search systems with private indexation carried out by Tirant law
experts team. So, and I shall talk later about this, we needed a big lawyers team
making us the indexing systems and commenting documents.
www.tirantonline.com
4.3. It is an integrated and complete Database that combines :

4.3.1.-Legal exhaustive information.- About 50.000 legal rules from all the European
Community, Spanish Government, self-governing communities and town councils.

4.3.2.- Court opinions.- From all the Jurisdictional orders. More than 500.000
documents.

4.3.3.-Bibliography information

4.3.4.-Forms.- Very important in the Spanish Market.

4.3.5.- And Authors opinions, Books, articles, Authors remarks, Legal
Observations... Now we have introduced the equivallent to 2.000.000 pages. (two
million pages)
in order to make an integrated database that let us profile our relative strenght in paper
and doctrinal market and to export it to electronic market. At least those were our
desires
substring
www.tirantonline.com
4.4. Tirantonline works with a relative small team of employees in our headquarters in
Valencia and in Madrid, and with a big team of "free lances" (60) that works for us in part
time. (*5 )Usually they are professors, Judges, attorneys... Each matter is coordinated
by a prestigious lawyer (Usually a professor of each subject: Criminal, Company law..)
4.5. I shall avoid the financial, software, hardware, operative and commercial problems
because I understand that they are not the aim of this lecture. But it can be easily
imagined. Anyway three years later the situation has changed, the internet world is
completely installed in the company, and the project is growing and developing in a
satisfactory way
Now the composition sales of our publishing house is:




Students Books............40%
Practical Books............ 25%
Other Books................15%
Subscription (database).................20%
You can realize the big change produced.
40%
35%
Students Books
30%
25%
20%
Practicals
Books
15%
Another Books
10%
Suscrption
(database)
5%
0%
%
5. HOW TO OBTAIN THE NECESSARY CONTENTS
When you start making a database one problem yo have to face is how to accumulate all
these contents in a rightful and quick way. Unfortunately there is neither a book nor a
master or a guide that could explain you the best way of working. As I said before we have
five types of





a) Bibliography.- There were no legal and real problems. We had previously a complete
Bibliography (from all the publishing houses) database in our Virtual Bookstore
(www.tirant.es) , so the only problem was to adapt the information to Tirantonline
requirements .
b) Legal information: It was a big problem. One has to realize that is very difficult to make
a legal complete database from nothing. So we began with our own Legal information
books. They had the 5% of the total information but was the more important part. And
slowly, in three years, we began to capture legal information and to revise it, indexe it,
comment it, actualize it, verify it....
c ) Court Opinions.- In Spain we have a public organ ( CENDOJ) that is the official supplier
in this type of documents. So we bought the court opinions to CENDOJ .(1*) We also got
resolutions from official websites from Spain. And after that our team began to revise,
indexe, comment. Today in Tirantonline there are 500.000 ( half a million) total court
opinions and more than 60.000 (sixty thousand) are worked by us
d ) Models : We take them from Tirant authors ( books previously published) and we
complete them with special charges. Usually we entrusted book and Database together.
e) Authors: The initial way out was that we took from Tirant authors ( books previously
published) and we complete with special charges. Usually we entrusted book and
Database together. Also we bought electronic rights from some paper reviews. Sometimes
our own collaborators make remarks, observations, etc .
6. AUTHOR RIGHTS and OTHER LEGAL SITUATIONS

6.1 Legal information and Court opinions: In Spain our

Our law service understood that the official pages that show their resolutions were not
included in that case, so Tirant got resolutions from those pages. (it´s interesting at this
point the Directive 2003/98/CE TOL 573903 , about public information use)

A speciality of Spanish system created by “Protection of data legal norm” TOL 11223 is
also that the Courts opinion information must be anonymous. This generates a
considerable extra cost and produces strange situations, that I think are not completly
solved: one example:. What happens with a mistake ? Do we punish every resolution or
do we understand that must be massive? Why does our Constitutional court publish its
own resolutions in its website with the complete names? If the resolutions are public ,
could another norm limit the publicity ? What happens with the European court ?
Another solution we have applied to get the information is to make an agreement with a
entity that dispose of some parts of information interesting to the Database and buy it. A
development of this formula is to agree an exchange between information and database
service. And sometimes in the interchange agreement the entity wants to maintain the
information supplied like a free-lance author.

“Intellectual
property legal norm” TOL 292119 generate a Sui generis author right over the Databases
(9). That's why the database owners have this special protection over the information
system (not over the final documentation) . Also the “disloyal competition legal norm” TOL
257367 protects the database owners in the way that the information introduced in their
databases can not be massively (2) reproduced. In that case will be generated a disloyal
act because the cost of the acquisition , treatment, etc of the second purchaser is
considerably smaller than the first owner. Recently in Spain one important resolution TOL
121066 has aplied specificly these norms (6).
6.2 Authors and Models
When we began with Tirantonline we studied two possible systems:



a) To pay a canon by visit.- I thought hard about this possibility but it was very
complicated. Sometimes the commercial importance has not a direct relationship with
the visits number, the Statistical software is complicated , the relationship between
number of visits and money did not realize another common "standards in Spanish law
rights (i.ex prestige of the author, of the subject, etc…) and also the visits/ratio could be
manipulated by the document situation in the database .
I do not rule out the possibility of changing my mind in the future but today I see more
difficulties than advantages in doing so.
b) To pay an extra fixed canon when we profit the information in paper and in database.
That is the system we have used. In Spanish law we understand that there are three
basic requirements:
- a) Must be written
- b) Must be specific (not to internet, but to www.tirantonline.com)
- c) Must be paid.
As I said before we began with the models and opinions published in our own books. In
this situation we asked for write permission to the authors. Sometimes this permissions
were free from author rights and sometimes (most of the times) we paid for them. Also
we began to contract Specific works that were paid only for the database.
6.3 PEOPLE WHO WORKS IN INDEXATION,
ENTITLED AND SMALL REMARKS

All the external people who works in Tirantonline are controlled by our Tirantonline
contents Manager and by their area director

As I said we maintain a relative big team of "free lance" law experts that make us an
Indexation labour, small remarks an the entitled of some documents. They also make
another small works. In this situation we pay monthly like an external supplier and I
understand that there is not exactly rights author property applied to those kind of
works.

A different case are the Area directors. They are in a similar situation to the
external experts but with higher tasks. Particularly all the database indexation
system is done by them. In this case the Directors area made us a complete transfer
of the rights of the indexation system. Obviously it is a paid transfer. In this
agreement is included that the future evolution of the indexation system is decided by
the publishing house and developed by the area team.
INPUTS

1) Courts opinions
Differents courts
Some courts
Official sites
CENDOJ
TIRANT

2) Legal Information
Official Websites (boe…)
Our own legal information books
Another ways
TIRANT

3) Bibliography
Our own bookstore database
TIRANT

4) Models and Authors opinions
Our own books
Special assistance
Our own team
Another publishing house
TIRANT
THE DATABASE USERS




SOME DATA
Today we have 1.200 different
clients and more than 7.000
individual users. About 2000
people visit our database
everyday (more than 1 visit per
minute) . There is no hour in the
day without visits.
TWO Types
We have two Types of online
market users:
The individual customs are usually
lawyers (2-3) that work in a small
office . We sell to them one license
that allows the Database use in the
offices and at home. We allow the
access with password system






We control the whole amount of individual accesses. Also we always ask for the DNI
(Identity) number like a part of the password.
2) The Institutional Costumes: Big Law firms, Universities, Public Offices, Courts, Law
associations, etc. Usually we authorize the customs access with IP address and limit of
contenders visits. Also we facilitate individual passwords for making possible the
private house use.
As I told before we have begun to arrive to mixed contracts between Database access
and specific information. Two weeks ago we have signed a very important and a very
complicated contract that gives service to 3.000 law professionals.
The database use must be done according to the Spanish legislation. These are the
basic requirements (“Intellectual property legal norm” TOL 292119) :
The database costumer must do a normal use of the information offered by the
publisher, including the right to use widely all the information offered.
Obviously They can not:
-Give the password to non authorised users
- They are put under the general legal limits
We really do not know the illegal index use that can be done by our users (2).
FUTURE SITUATIONS

We begin to arrive to agreements where the custom transfer us information. So we
assume the problem of transferring the law rights that the client has previously.

Maybe the new Intellectual property legal norm, should introduce the private copy
right in the same way that the books. I think this is an atypical situation that
should finish.