Book Description




Collective Management of Copyright and Related Rights


Book Description

In the course of the last two decades, collective management organizations (CMOs) have become the nerve centres of copyright licensing in virtually every country. Their expertise and knowledge of copyright law and management have proven essential to make copyright work in the digital age. However, they have also been at the centre of debates about their efficiency, their transparency and their governance. This book, an extensively revised and updated edition of the major work on the legal status of CMOs, offers an in-depth analysis of the various operating CMO models, their rights and obligations vis-à-vis both users and members, acquisition of legal authority to license, and (most important) the rights to license digital uses of protected material and build (or improve current) information systems to deal with ever more complex rights management and licensing tasks. All the chapters have been updated since the 2010 edition. New chapters on Africa, China, Central Europe and New Zealand (together with Australia, which is no longer discussed in the separate chapter on Canada) have been added. Factors considered include the following: • role of 'families' such as the International Confederation of Societies of Authors and Composers (CISAC) and the International Federation of Reproduction Rights Organizations (IFRRO); • cases where the unavailability of adequating options makes authorized use difficult or impossible taking transaction costs into account; • growing importance of extended repertoire systems (also known as extended collective licensing); • relationship among collective management, rights to remuneration, and the ways in which CMOs acquire authority to license; • transnational licensing and the possible role of multi-territorial licensing; and • threat of monopolies or regional oligopolies for the management of online music rights. Legal underpinnings covered in the course of the analysis include the 1996 WIPO Copyright Treaties, the US Digital Millennium Copyright Act, the Napster case, the Santiago Agreement, relevant EU Papers and the 2014 Copyright Directive, and work done by the UN Committee on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights. Part I presents a number of horizontal issues that affect collective management in almost every country. Part II is divided on a geographical basis, focusing on systems representative of the principal models applied in various countries and regions. Each country specific or region-specific chapter provides a historical overview and a presentation of existing CMOs and their activities, gives financial information where available, describes how CMOs are supervised or controlled by legislation, and offers thoughts about the challenges facing CMOs in the country or region concerned. Many of these national and regional commentaries are the only such information sources available in English. Whatever the future of copyright holds, it is clear that users will continue to want access and the ability to reuse material lawfully, and authors and other rights holders will want to ensure that they can put some reasonable limits on those uses, including an ability to monetize commercially relevant uses. CMOs are sure to be critical intermediaries in this process. The second edition of this important resource, with its key insights into the changing nature of collective management, will be of immeasurable value to all concerned with shaping policy towards collective management or working with the ever more complex legal issues arising in digital age copyright matters.










Ownership of Rights in Audiovisual Productions


Book Description

In a single generation audiovisual production technology has made two enormous leaps: interactivity and digital exploitation. Any law that deals with satellite transmission must take into account the ownership rights in audiovisual productions, and maintain a clear perspective on how existing laws in the field have been adapted - and will continue to be adapted - to protect authors. Who owns the digital exploitation rights in the audiovisual work? Who is entitled to collect remunerations collected from private copying? How do moral rights affect the licensing of rights in audiovisual works? These are some of the most contentious questions dealt with in this book. The book provides a comprehensive comparative framework for analysis of the regulation of ownership of rights in audiovisual productions in Europe. It is the first presentation that examines these issues in the light of revised Nordic copyright laws and the respective national regulations of Germany, France, Belgium, the United Kingdom and the United States. In addition, the book explains in detail how international and European Community regulations affect rights owners in audiovisual productions. The audiovisual sector is also an area where the differences between the civil law systems of author's rights and common law based copyright systems are particularly pronounced. This book clarifies some of the common misunderstandings encountered in this respect.




Copyright in Cyberspace


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Balancing Copyright - A Survey of National Approaches


Book Description

How does copyright law take into account the interests of third parties, especially the general public’s interest in the greatest possible dissemination of knowledge and culture? Twelve basic questions give copyright law experts from more than forty countries the opportunity to provide answers related to their national law on the following matters: categories of works and subject matter, eligibility conditions, duration, “users’ rights,” the three-step test, misuse, differentiations between categories of right holders, TPM, and relations of copyright law to other legal areas such as fundamental rights, competition law, consumer protection law, media law etc. The standardized form of the reports makes it easy to see the impacts of copyright law in the industrialized countries as well as in emerging economies; in common-law and civil-law approaches; in countries of the Andean Community and of the European Union, as well as in countries that are not party to the WIPO Treaties. A detailed preliminary chapter provides an approachable overview of issues and results. This chapter also discusses the voice of academia, represented by the European Copyright Code of the “Wittem Group.”




New Developments in EU and International Copyright Law


Book Description

More than a source of income and a means of protection for creators, rightholders, and the creative and entertainment industries, copyright is also a vehicle for technological advances and economic development. In the European Union, industries with intensive emphasis on intellectual property rights (mainly copyright) generate more than a quarter of employment and more than a third of economic activity. Yet copyright continues to be plagued by problematic attempts to balance the interests of rightholders, the public, consumers, intermediaries, collecting societies, different national legal traditions, and other forces, European and global. This book draws a comprehensive picture of current, pending, and proposed copyright developments – legislation, ‘communications,’ white papers, and court decisions – at the levels of the European Union and the World Intellectual Property Organization. Twenty-two well-known and prestigious experts on intellectual property law from seventeen jurisdictions worldwide contribute essays on particular trends in copyright, including discussions of the following and more: - making content available in an EU digital single market; - collective management and multi-territorial licensing; - exceptions for libraries and archives, education and research; - traditional knowledge and cultural expressions; - unjustified geoblocking; - illegal content on the Internet; - text and data mining; - copyright enforcement online; and - role of the European Court of Justice. Policy recommendations are also set forth, as well as a detailed conceptual framework for a potential EU Copyright Code. As a detailed and thoughtful overview of current trends in copyright internationally, this book has no peers. It is sure to be welcomed by practitioners, policymakers, academics, researchers, and business leaders for whom intellectual property rights, and especially copyright, are of the first importance.




The Copyright Wars


Book Description

Today's copyright wars can seem unprecedented. Sparked by the digital revolution that has made copyright—and its violation—a part of everyday life, fights over intellectual property have pitted creators, Hollywood, and governments against consumers, pirates, Silicon Valley, and open-access advocates. But while the digital generation can be forgiven for thinking the dispute between, for example, the publishing industry and Google is completely new, the copyright wars in fact stretch back three centuries—and their history is essential to understanding today’s battles. The Copyright Wars—the first major trans-Atlantic history of copyright from its origins to today—tells this important story. Peter Baldwin explains why the copyright wars have always been driven by a fundamental tension. Should copyright assure authors and rights holders lasting claims, much like conventional property rights, as in Continental Europe? Or should copyright be primarily concerned with giving consumers cheap and easy access to a shared culture, as in Britain and America? The Copyright Wars describes how the Continental approach triumphed, dramatically increasing the claims of rights holders. The book also tells the widely forgotten story of how America went from being a leading copyright opponent and pirate in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries to become the world’s intellectual property policeman in the late twentieth. As it became a net cultural exporter and its content industries saw their advantage in the Continental ideology of strong authors’ rights, the United States reversed position on copyright, weakening its commitment to the ideal of universal enlightenment—a history that reveals that today’s open-access advocates are heirs of a venerable American tradition. Compelling and wide-ranging, The Copyright Wars is indispensable for understanding a crucial economic, cultural, and political conflict that has reignited in our own time.




Droit d’auteur 4.0 / Copyright 4.0


Book Description

Cet ouvrage rassemble les contributions consacrées au droit d’auteur à l’ère du numérique et présentées lors de la Journée de Droit de la Propriété Intellectuelle (www.jdpi.ch) organisée le 22 février 2017 à l’Université de Genève. Ces contributions sont: Blocage de sites web en droit suisse : des injonctions civiles et administratives de blocage au séquestre pénal (Yaniv Benhamou) ; Website Blocking Injunctions-a decade of development (Jo Oliver/Elena Blobel) ; Le marché numérique européen : enseignements de la jurisprudence de la Cour de justice et perspectives règlementaires (Jean-Michel Bruguière) ; User-generated Content and Other Digital Copyright Challenges: A North American Perspective (Ysolde Gendreau) ; Copyright in the Digital Age: A view from Asia (Wenwei Guan) ; Deep Copyright: Up - and Downstream Questions Related to Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML) (Daniel Schoenberger).