Copyright reform: while Member States move piecemeal, the Commission plans substantial changes
Published on 17th Dec 2014
Of all of the areas of law affected by the advent of the internet and global telecommunications, copyright is among the most criticised. Conceived to manage the cultural and economic interests of creators, producers and consumers of physical products, it has repeatedly come up short when invoked to handle cultural products transformed into the virtual environment.
The 2001 Directive on Copyright in the Information Society in practice did little either to harmonise the divergences between national copyright laws, or to adapt it for the digital production and consumption of content. But the European Commission has never let the issue out of its sight for very long. Having tackled the thorny problem of access to orphan works, and spent considerable energy attempting to create a single market for access to sound recordings across the European Union, the draft Work Programme for 2015 proposes a similar exercise in respect of broadcasts and audio-visual Works – a proposal which is certain to be no less controversial and complex to work out than were the issues of copyright collecting societies.
The details of the latest round of reforms will not be released until May 2015. But Member States have not stood still meanwhile. 2014 saw reforms to national copyright laws in three of the major markets – Belgium, Spain and the United Kingdom – and we review these, and their potential impacts in the relevant publications below:
