EU copyright regime

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Resources:

  • Study on the Implementation and Effect in Member States' Laws of Directive 2001/29/EC on the Harmonisation of Certain Aspects of Copyright and Related Rights in the Information Society, P.B. Hugenholtz, et al., report to the European Commission, DG Internal Market, February 2007.

(a) http://www.ivir.nl/publications/guibault/Infosoc_report_2007.pdf

(b) Part II: Country Reports on the Implementation of Directive 2001/29/EC in the Member States, G. Westkamp, Queen Mary Intellectual Property Research Institute, February 2007. http://www.ivir.nl/publications/guibault/InfoSoc_Study_2007.pdf

(c) Executive summary : http://www.ivir.nl/publications/guibault/Infosoc_Executive_Summary.pdf

  • EUCD Best Practice Guide: Implementing the EU Copyright Directive in the Digital Age

Urs Gasser & Silke Ernst, 2006. http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=952561

  • FIPR Guide to EU Copyright Laws

http://www.fipr.org/copyright/guide/

About liability of intermediaries in the EU:

The EU E-commerce directive provides for safe harbours for mere conduit, caching and hosting for ISPs. In that respect there are not much differences with the DMCA in the US. There is no safe harbour for information location tools (search engines), such as in the DMCA. A couple of countries in the EU have chosen to implement safe harbours for search engines, such as Spain and Austria, but their skope varies. The Ecommerce directive allows for that. It will be evaluated this year, including the feasibility of introducing safe harbours for search engines. (The directive excplicitly states that)

The E-Commerce directive however deals with all sorts of liability, not only with copyright. This is a big difference with the US, where other forms of intermediary liability, such as regarding defamation are covered by CDA, article 230.

In the case of possible copyright infringement by intermediaries there can be a rather complex overlap between the Infosoc directive and the E-commerce directive's safe harbours. Simply stated, first the copyright regime should be taken into account and then the general safe harbours.

That intermediary liability, especially in copyright matters, is still a developing issue is maybe best illustrated by the remarkable ruling of a court in Belgium fourcing a broadband provider to start filtering out copyright protectes packages out of the p2p traffic on its network. http://www.edri.org/edrigram/number5.14/belgium-isp

(Thanks to Joris for writing the content)