Publicaties

Almost everyone agrees that modern copyright law needs to be flexible in order to accommodate rapid technological change and evolving media uses. In the United States fair use is the flexible instrument of choice. Author’s right systems in Europe are generally deemed to be less flexible and less tolerant to open-ended limitations and exceptions. But are they really?
This chapter makes the case that (1) author’s rights systems can be made as flexible as copyright systems, and (2) that the existing EU legal framework does not preclude the development of flexible norms at the national level.

Despite 25 years of copyright harmonization the law of copyright in the EU has remained, essentially, national and territorial. For the world of tangible (physical) goods a similar problem of market fragmentation was solved decades ago by the ECJ establishing a rule of ‘Community exhaustion’ of the right of distribution. Ever since, goods incorporating intellectual property, such as records, books and trademarked clothing, may circulate freely across the EU after their initial authorized marketing in a Member State. Why not introduce a similar rule for the world of non-physical distribution? We do have an interesting precedent. Satellite broadcasting market suffered from similar copyright problems as the on line content services market today. In 1993 the Sat-Cab Directive solved such problems stating that satellite broadcasting is a relevant act for copyright purposes only in the country of origin of the signal. As a consequence, a license to broadcast audiovisual content by satellite would be needed only in the Member State from where the satellite signal was uplinked. This article examines the legal ramifications of the extension of the country of origin principle to the on line environment.