Copyright measures to harmonise rules

Date: 14/11/1996

By Chris Johnstone

A COMMUNICATION on copyright and related rights due to be adopted by the European Commission next week will propose measures to align national rules on the legal protection of intellectual property.

But it will duck some of the key issues causing concern among copyright holders with the advent of the information society.

The communication has been the target of frenetic lobbying, since it touches on the key issue of balancing protection for copyright holders, such as film and record companies, with making their material available to the numerous media which will be spawned by the information revolution.

The aim is to give companies greater certainty as an incentive for them to invest in information highway technology.

The paper sets out a handful of areas for immediate action in the expectation that they will become the subject either of a series of separate directives, or of an all-embracing measure, to be drawn up by the Directorate-General for the internal market (DGXV) next year.

The first priority will be to bring some order to Europe's patchwork of regulations on the duplication of copyright material.

Existing rules in some member states, for example, offer copyright exemptions for public libraries or personal copying of written or recorded works. Europe's multi-million-ecu music industry wants private copying trimmed to a minimum.

A second priority will be to establish a uniform EU-wide protection against piracy for firms holding distribution rights on copyright material, to avoid rights holders having to refer to 15 different sets of national laws when they suspect any infringement of the rules.

The paper will also call for an EU legal framework enabling companies to use technical devices to protect themselves against the threat of wholesale piracy when digital technology can create copies of the same standard as the original.

However, the paper does not give an immediate answer to the question of whether record industry performers and producers should have exclusive rights over their material, or whether the current situation in which they are sometimes paid for reproduction of material but have no power to vet users, should remain in place.

It will also say the allied problem of what “moral” rights copyright holders have to prevent their music or films being altered in the new digital environment should be addressed at a later stage.

The tricky issue of where legal protection against piracy should be enforced is also deferred.

Copyright holders do not want the EU to follow the same path as in the cable and satellite sectors, of applying the law of the particular country where the transmissions originated. They fear this would simply encourage pirate companies to flock to whichever country offered the least copyright protection.