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In the light of the importance of legislative history to understanding the history of, as well as interpreting, European legislation, we have decided to collect together the surviving travaux préparatoires relating to the various directives and regulations in the field of intellectual property and information law.  Since the late 1990s the Council of the EU has posted most of the Council Working Party and the Committee of Permanent Representative papers on its website and the European Parliament has done likewise as regards the preparatory papers of its committees and plenary sessions.  It is also possible in these cases to search for relevant papers under, for example, the interinstitutional file code (e.g. 2011/0011 (COD) in the case of the General Data Protection Regulation 2016/679).  Given this, we have focused on organizing the preparatory material of instruments which were negotiated prior to the late 1990s as these documents are much less readily available.

This project has been partially supported through funding generously provided by the Intellectual Property Institute on its dissolution. These documents have been collated into optical character recognised (OCR) bundles and arranged in chronological and in some cases also thematic tables through the efforts of Beril Boz, Oliver Butler, David Erdos, Stefanie Felsberger, Claire Hill, Gaenor Moore and Yin Harn Lee.