Giuseppe Mazziotti (CEPS Research Fellow and Co-Manager of the CEPS Digital Forum): Copyright in the EU Digital Single Market.
"The scope and the enforcement of copyright in the digital environment have been among the most complex and controversial issues for lawmakers all over the world for the last decade. Due to the ubiquitous use of digital technology, modern regulation of copyright inherently touches upon various areas of law and social and economic policy, including communications privacy as well as Internet governance.
As recently shown by the European Parliament’s rejection of the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA), the issue of online copyright enforcement is politically so sensitive that it can easily lead to strong clashes between the EU institutions, potentially frustrating years of policy-making and international negotiations. At the same time, legislative improvements in the area of online enforcement risk becoming useless if the conditions of licensing of copyright are not smooth and transparent for both rights-holders and users of creative content in an increasingly borderless digital environment. This objective has proven to be hard to achieve in the EU, where copyright law is still regulated as a territorial right at national levels, and ownership regimes and licensing practices vary considerably from one country to another in spite of the various directives that have harmonised national laws in the last 20 years. A more efficient and transparent framework for the licensing of digital uses of copyrighted content would certainly place creators, content producers and commercial exploiters in a much better position to develop new business models."
Lees het gehele rapport hier.
