IFPI Claims Success of Progressive Reponse in Curbing Infringement January 30, 2012
Posted by Bill Rosenblatt in Europe, Law, New Zealand.2 comments
The International Federation for the Phonographic Industry (IFPI), the global umbrella of national music trade associations like the RIAA in the United States, published its annual Digital Music Report last week. Among the most interesting findings is results of studies of the effects of the progressive response law enacted in France in 2009.
The French Creation and Internet Law, which is referred to as “Hadopi” after the agency it created (Haute Autorité pour la Diffusion des Oeuvres et la Protection des droits sur l’Internet), is one of a handful of so-called progressive response regimes, in which ISPs in a given country are obliged to respond to complaints about file-sharing by issuing a series of increasingly stern warnings and then potentially suspending their Internet accounts or fining them.
IFPI worked with Nielsen to measure Hadopi’s effects on file-sharing in France, and found that the effect was to decrease file-sharing by 26% over the year after Hadopi’s October 2010 implementation, although the numbers have been creeping back up a bit since October 2011. IFPI’s report also published the results of a separate academic study by economists at Carnegie-Mellon University and Wellesley College that claims a net increase of 22.5-25% in paid iTunes music downloads from before to after Hadopi was implemented.
The IFPI report also cites studies that show that warning messages have an effect: a May 2011 study found that 50% of people who either received a Hadopi notice or knew someone who got one stopped their illegal file-sharing. The same measurement for South Korea, another country with progressive response in place, was 70%.
Critics of progressive response reply that P2P file-sharing has been decreasing anyway, that file-sharing is “yesterday’s problem” as copyright infringement moves from file-sharing networks to torrent sites, cyberlockers, and other places. It’s hard to argue that the reduction of 26% in French file-sharing means “piracy has decreased by 26%” (and in fact IFPI isn’t arguing that at all). Yet the graph in the IFPI report clearly indicates a drop in file-sharing activity that coincides with the deployment of Hadopi.
It’s worth bearing in mind that the vast majority of Hadopi activity is warnings, which fall under the heading of “education” instead of “technical protection measures,” because the warnings don’t actually prevent users from doing anything that they could do before.
At the same time, there is one sour note in the IFPI report: in a discussion of the graduated response system in New Zealand (which accompanied a decrease in P2P usage of 16%), rights holders complain that “the high cost of notifications to ISPs … could prevent the graduated response system being used over the long term to optimum effect.” In other words, it’s not enough to have a government-mandated requirement for ISPs to act on complaints of file-sharing; copyright owners also don’t want to have to pay to generate the complaints. I don’t know what they call this in New Zealand, but in France, Marie Antoinette might have called it “Qu’ils ont de la brioche et la manger aussi.”*
P.S. The IFPI Digital Music Report also contains the very exciting statistic that the total of paying users of music subscription services has shot up 65% over the past year to an estimated 13 million plus. That number blows by the 10 million that I thought would be reached by next September.
*”Let them have their cake and eat it too.”
European High Court Says No to ISP-Level Copyright Filtering November 28, 2011
Posted by Bill Rosenblatt in Europe, Fingerprinting, Law, Music, Services.add a comment
Last Thursday the European Court of Justice (ECJ) ruled that ISPs cannot be held responsible for filtering traffic on their networks in order to catch copyright infringements. This ruling was the final step in the journey of the litigation between the Belgian music rights collecting society SABAM and the ISP Scarlet, but it is a landmark decision for all of Europe.
This ruling overturned the Belgian Court of First Instance, which four years ago required Scarlet to install filtering technology such as acoustic fingerprinting to monitor Internet traffic and block uploads of copyrighted material to the network. Scarlet appealed this decision to the Brussels Court of Appeals, which sought guidance from the ECJ.
The ECJ’s statement affirmed copyright holders’ rights to seek injunctions from ISPs like Scarlet to prevent copyright infringement, but it said that the Belgian court’s injunction requiring ISP-level copyright filtering went too far. It cited Article 3 of European Union Directive 2004/48, which states that “measures, procedures and remedies [for enforcing intellectual property rights] shall be fair and equitable, shall not be unnecessarily complicated or costly and not impose unreasonable time-limits or unwarranted delays.” The ECJ decided that the mechanism defined in the appeals court’s ruling did not meet these criteria.
The real issues here are the requirement that the ISP bear the cost and complexity of running the filtering technology, and the fact that running it would slow down the network for all ISP users. It’s easy to see how this would not meet the requirements in the above EU Directive.
This decision has direct applicability in the European Union, but its implications could reach further afield. For example, the issue currently being argued between Viacom and Google at the appeals court level in the United States boils down to the same thing: whose bears the cost and responsibilty to police copyrights on the Internet?
Of course, EU law doesn’t apply in the United States. In the Viacom/Google litigation, Google is relying on the “notice and takedown” portion of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), a/k/a section 512 of the US copyright law. This says that if a copyright holder (e.g., Viacom) sees one of its works online without its authorization, it can issue a notice to the network service provider to take the work down, and if it does so, it won’t be liable for infringement. Google’s argument is that it follows section 512 assiduously and therefore should not be liable.
Viacom’s task in this litigation is to convince the court that the DMCA doesn’t go far enough. More specifically, its argument is that the legislative intent behind the DMCA is not served well enough by the notice-and-takedown provisions, that network service providers should be required to take more proactive responsibility for policing copyrights on their services instead of requiring copyright owners to play the Whack-a-Mole game of notice and takedown.
The ECJ’s decsion in SABAM v. Scarlet has no precedential weight in Viacom v. Google. But it may help get the Third Circuit Appeals Court to focus on what Jonathan Zittrain of Harvard Law School has called the “gravamen” (which is legalese for “MacGuffin“) in this case: who should be paying for protecting copyrights.
How High Will Spotify’s Paid Subscribership Go? August 10, 2011
Posted by Bill Rosenblatt in Business models, Europe, Music, Services, United States.1 comment so far
More on the direct consumer revenue trend: the first set of results of Spotify’s US launch are in, courtesy of the Wall Street Journal’s All Things D. As of earlier this week, only a month into the service’s US presence, Spotify has signed up 1.4 million subscribers, of which 175,000 are paying. At 12.5%, that’s a bit lower than the 15-16% paid subscribership Spotify is enjoying in Europe, but it doesn’t change Spotify’s overall paid-subscriber rate very much.
All Things D’s Peter Kafka points out that the US conversion rate from free to paid is likely to be lower because US subscribers get more free music during the first six months of the US launch than European free subscribers do. But I would also argue that the conversion rate is lower because Spotify is new in the US, and people are just trying it out — many of whom may already subscribe to a competing service such as Rhapsody.
Given that the addressable market for Spotify increased by 150% when it launched in the US (about 150 million Internet users in the seven European countries in which Spotify operates vs. about 220 million in the US), Spotify’s total subscribership could end up in the multiple tens of millions fairly quickly. But to me, the more important question is: given the steep growth in its percentage of paid subscribers, where does that growth stop?
Here’s a poll:
European Music Rights Database Project Issues RFP August 23, 2010
Posted by Bill Rosenblatt in Europe, Rights Licensing.2 comments
A request for proposals (RFP) has been issued for a Global Repertoire Database (GRD), which would contain rights holder information for music to be licensed throughout the European Union. Submissions are due in mid-October, and the GRD Working Group expects to make a decision on how to move forward by December.
Let’s fill in some of the background details to give this news some context; then we’ll talk about the GRD and its RFP themselves.
A few years ago, the European Commission (EC) determined that the lack of pan-European (or “single market”) music licensing was hurting European citizens’ access to legitimate online music services and causing more Europeans to turn to illegitimate sources for their digital music. And indeed, the bureaucratic hurdles required to get licenses to distribute music in all countries of the EU are monumental.
Yet the EC’s push for pan-European licensing has met with stiff resistance from member states, mainly for two reasons: fear that such an initiative would only serve to make it easier for US-based media giants to cram their commercial content down Europeans’ throats, and the Culture Ministries of certain EU member states’ belief that it is their duty to advance their own countries’ content and not to make it easier to license content in from other member states.
Meanwhile, the voices being heard in Brussels were those of lobbyists from large technology companies like Apple and Google and the entrenched national music rights collecting societies, such as GEMA in Germany, SACEM in France, PRS for Music in the UK, and so on. Entrepreneurial startups trying to build attractive legal music services throughout Europe weren’t represented in these debates.
The subject of pan-European music licensing fell somewhere among three EC Directorates: Information Society and Media (then Viviane Reding), Internal Market (then Charlie McCreevy), and Competition (then Neelie Kroes). Commissioner Kroes, with her reputation as a tough-minded enforcer of antitrust law against the likes of Microsoft, was able to convene an Online Commerce Working Group in 2008 that brought together stakeholders from across the spectrum. This led to a statement in October of last year in which a group of music publishers and collecting societies essentially promised to maybe someday consider the prospect of possibly working out the parameters of the shape that a potential solution might perhaps take.
Yet in the spring of this year, progress finally began to accelerate. The GRD was conceived, a Working Group was formed, and the group issued a Request for Information (RFI) from companies that would consider submitting proposals to design and build the GRD. Over 30 organizations submitted responses, convincing the Working Group that the GRD could be at least technically feasible. Meanwhile, the EU launched the Digital Agenda for Europe and put Kroes in charge of it. The “digital single market” topped the list of her objectives.
The GRD is a fine idea in concept. Although the idea of a universally accessible database of rights holder information has been a dream for many in the content industries for a long time, the inspiration for the GRD is clearly the Book Rights Registry (BRR) defined in the pending settlement between the book publishing industry and Google. However, there are two major differences between the GRD and the BRR.
First is participation. The GRD Working Group has some of the right players: online retailers (Amazon, Apple iTunes, Nokia), music publishers (EMI, Universal), and collecting societies (PRS for Music, SACEM, and STIM of Sweden) are involved. But conspicuous in their absence from the Working Group are other major collecting societies (particularly GEMA of Germany), the two other major music publishers (Sony/ATV and Warner/Chappell), and any of the new breed of online music startups looking to launch throughout Europe (Spotify, Pandora, and various others). The lack of participation by network operators like Vodafone, Telefonica, and Deutsche Telekom is also problematic. In contrast, the major stakeholders in the US book industry agree in principle on the BRR, even if they may disagree on some terms of the lawsuit settlement itself.
The second problem is that whereas Google is agreeing to spend over US $30 Million to fund the BRR, there is no source of money to build the GRD. In fact, the RFP asks respondents to submit proposals in the knowledge that the project might not be funded and that the Working Group would not consider funding options until after choosing a winning proposal.
Both of these are serious hurdles to surmount. Lack of participation from major players has killed many a well-intentioned standardization initiative. The RFP addresses the “unfunded mandate” issue by suggesting three options for funding: divert money from systems that would no longer be needed with the GRD in place; get a collecting society to run the GRD with existing technology and processes, thereby greatly reducing the costs; or allowing some other entity to run it as a commercial enterprise. More on this later.
The RFP itself is comprehensive, well informed, and well organized. Just as importantly, it is unflinchingly (and refreshingly) realistic. It is forthright about the challenges inherent in launching the GRD: not only the usual technical ones but also problems with the inconsistency and incompleteness of data coming from content rights holders, disputes over ownership, lack of participation by key stakeholders, and so on. It incorporates standards for identifiers and other things in the music industry (ISWC, ISRC, and so on) but acknowledges their current lack of universality at record labels and music publishers. The RFP is also clear about the GRD’s limitations: the GRD is meant to be a source of information about rights ownership, not an e-commerce engine.
The one problem with the conception of the GRD is that it is essentially a recipe for paving the existing cowpaths. On the one hand, it’s necessary to do this, and it would produce significant efficiencies. But on the other hand, it falls short for those who would launch new business models that don’t conform to existing licensing rules. The Google book settlement at least makes mention of new business models, admittedly without saying much about how (or if) the BRR would support them. But even if the GRD is built, entrepreneurs with new ideas will still have to negotiate separately with each of the collecting societies and other rights holders in Europe. (I’m involved in one such negotiation now, one that the existence of the GRD would probably not help.)
Yet even cowpath-paving is a major undertaking, as anyone who reads the GRD RFP will understand. It’s likely that many major technology companies and professional services firms will want to respond, if only for the visibility they would get through the process. However, one of those firms actually building the GRD doesn’t strike me as a likely outcome, because of the dubious commercial proposition. Instead, I suspect that if the GRD gets built at all, one of the major collecting societies will get the job — after sufficient conciliatory representations about cooperation and non-competition, perhaps with oversight by CISAC (the international collecting society umbrella organization).
A precedent for this is the Digital Object Identifier (DOI) standard in publishing. After it became clear that money wasn’t available to hire an outsider to run the initiative, it was given to someone from one of the major scientific publishers (Elsevier Science, as it was then called), which agreed to keep him on salary while he did the job, and while the other publishers involved in the initiative agreed to overlook competitive concerns. As a result, the DOI’s only real impact has been in scientific journal publishing.
Another precedent exists in the US, where the Copyright Clearance Center, the collecting society for text-oriented works, operates RightsLink, the closest thing there is to an online-accessible repository of rights holder information for that type of content. RightsLink is a valuable and successful service, but it only offers “lowest common denominator” rights; anyone wishing to license content on a different basis has to go talk to individual publishers.
All this shows the long journey that the European music industry must take to make their territory more hospitable to the services that are attempting to launch throughout the EU. The GRD is an important step along the way, but the challenges in getting it off the ground are more than enough to think about for the time being.
New Initiatives by the European Commission and UK June 1, 2010
Posted by Bill Jones in Economics, Europe, Law, UK.add a comment
The Copyright and Enforcement Directorate of the UK’s Intellectual Property Office has reported on two new EU developments in a broadcast email. Since I can’t find the URL for the Directorate [I can't either - ed], I’m left to summarize:
The European Commission has published two recent papers which will impact on our industry:
A New Strategy for the Single Market: This report addresses the challenges to the single market. The report comments on the ill-adapted IP legislation as a barrier to economic progress. It also recognizes that low-cost and legally secure protection of IPRs is of great importance.
The paper proposes, inter alia:
- An EU-wide copyright law, including an EU framework for copyright clearance and management;
- Harmonized copyright levies on blank media and equipment (to simplify the business environment); and
- Adoption of the EU-wide patent and a single patent jurisdiction as a matter of urgency.
A Digital Agenda for Europe: This first initiative is under the Commission’s flagship “Europe 2020” economic program and its main Telecoms and Copyright strategy document.
The text is very wide ranging. The Paper considers transactions in the digital environment to be too complex, with inconsistent implementation of the rules across member states.
It concludes that the EU needs to enhance the protection against online violations of intellectual property rights.
Intellectual Property-related key points in the Digital Agenda include:
- A commitment on reforming governance of collecting societies, and a new initiative to look into cross-border licensing.
- A commitment to orphan works legislation, and looking into out-of-print works
- A commitment to evaluate (not revise) the EU E-commerce Directive this year; and
- A commitment to strengthening Europeana, the European digital library.
Meanwhile, UK’s telecommunications regulator Ofcom has published its consultation on its draft code of practice to reduce online copyright infringement as part of its new duties under the Digital Economy Act 2010: Online Infringement of Copyright and the Digital Economy Act 2010.
As austerity bites, many European countries have to reduce government expenditure as a proportion of GDP – some have started already. Figures in the range of 5% to 10% of GDP are bandied around. These will bite very deeply into initiatives, delivery and operations. Individual departments and agencies could well be subjected to reductions of 25%.
One also can’t see the EU escaping this development since it is funded to the extent of approx 1.24% of the Union’s gross national income (GNI), by individual countries (0.73% of their GNI), duties charged on imports from non-EU states, and a VAT component.
So while all the above initiatives are reality, one wonders what effect these austerity measures will have on them over time.
Bill Jones is CEO of Global Village Ltd.
Digging in the TechDirt January 22, 2010
Posted by Bill Rosenblatt in Europe, Law, Publishing.11 comments
The German news publishing industry is asking for an antitrust investigation into Google’s search advertising practices, which mirrors concerns about what news publishers all over the world have raised for years over what they call “free riding.”
This story wouldn’t have gotten that much attention on this side of the Atlantic Ocean — other than the New York Times story referenced above — but for a post about it by Mike Masnick on Techdirt this past Tuesday. (No, I won’t help Techdirt’s search engine rankings by including a link.) In the post, Masnick accuses German news publishers of being “Apparently Very Confused [a]bout How [t]he Internet Works.”
If there’s anyone here who’s confused about how the Internet works, it’s Mike Masnick. Techdirt is not alone among the dressed-up blogs that attract lots of traffic with their stories about the tech industry that often betray smugness and ignorance, but this one — as they might say on the other side of the pond — takes the biscuit. It scales new heights of wrongheadedness and irresponsibility among widely-read publications.
Masnick should use his favorite search engine and look up “free riding” or “contextual advertising” to find out what he’s missing. He should also look up “Google book settlement” to find that what the German news industry is doing is far from original — although the antitrust approach is somewhat novel. Finally, he should understand the difference between Google News and plain old Google search results (a difference that the Times article admittedly glosses over).
Masnick adds insult to injury by suggesting that the blinkered, hopelessly out-of-it German news publishers have no right to launch a legal action against Google because they have failed to monetize the Internet thus far. Uh, says who? Oh, right… says Mike Masnick.
(And by the way, this isn’t the first time. Mike Masnick has a history of writings about copyright-related issues that betray less knowledge of the subject matter than he believes himself to possess. This is why I don’t normally read Techdirt.)
Normally I’d post a comment to the Techdirt story itself. But after the 50 or so comments posted over the past two days, my comment would be utterly lost after all the other comments about Hitler, World War II, Iraq, and other issues highly relevant to the long-running, unsettled disputes between search engines and publishers over contextual advertising and the right to display copyrighted works in search results.
2009 Year in Review, Part 2 January 5, 2010
Posted by Bill Rosenblatt in Asia-Pacific, Europe, Law, United States.1 comment so far
In this part of our annual year-end review, I’ll look back at legal developments related to digital copyright over the past year. The most interesting development was the enactment of so-called progressive response laws in Singapore, South Korea, and France. Under these laws, users who upload content to the Internet illegally get progressively stronger warnings followed by suspensions or terminations of their Internet accounts.
France enacted its progressive response law after much controversy. The original intent of the legislation was to set up a government-run authority that would automatically suspend or terminate repeat offenders’ accounts. But this provision was judged unconstitutional, a violation of due process and the presumption of innocence. The law that was ultimately passed did without the automation and instead referred repeat offenders to (human) judges — thereby ensuring that only the most egregious cases will be heard.
Nevertheless, the law has inspired other countries to follow along. Singapore and South Korea are reporting positive results, in terms of reduction in unauthorized content usage, from their laws.
The UK could be next. The possibility of progressive response legislation was mentioned in the Queen’s Speech last November, though my colleague Bill Jones believes that actual legislation won’t come to pass until at least 2011.
In the United States, the media industry has been holding off on getting Congress to pass stricter piracy control measures. Congress, after all, has been very difficult to distract from healthcare reform, the sluggish economy, various wars, and terrorism.
Instead, the most interesting US action in 2009 was in the form of litigation. Universal Music Group lost its district court lawsuit against video-sharing site Veoh for secondary copyright infringement, a decision that the music giant is expected to appeal. The massive infringement litigation between Viacom and Google/YouTube is only just getting out of its discovery phase (the early steps of fact-gathering and deposition-taking).
Both of these cases could determine whether online service providers should be required to take more responsibility for their copyright behaviors. This will require changes in the law that lower courts are unlikely to make; the real action will be at the appeals or even Supreme Court level. In other words, expect years to pass by until any definitive results occur.
Meanwhile, Google’s settlement with the book publishing industry and book authors is still waiting for the judge’s approval, which many expect to be granted in the coming year. The major bone of contention between the settling parties and those who object to the settlement is control over orphaned works — books for which no copyright owner has stepped forward.
It’s self-evident why the publishing industry should not care about Google’s desire to exert sole control over orphaned works, and Google may even have believed that it is doing the world a favor by digitizing them and making them accessible online. But several entities stepped forward to object, including advocates of a robust public domain as well as those whose motives are more opportunistic or ulterior (think Microsoft).
Google is likely to relent on orphaned works; many of the remaining objections are related to payment terms for publishers and authors.
The next step beyond settlement approval is the establishment of a Book Rights Registry (BRR) that will make data about scanned books, and their rights, available to whatever service provider wants them. As part of the settlement agreement, Google is paying US $35 Million to build the BRR, but it will be run by staff appointed and overseen by publishers and authors. This could take years. The settlement agreement is (understandably) short on details about how the BRR will be designed or work, but let’s just say there are ways to do it “quick and dirty” and ways to do it right.
The final interesting area related to technology and copyright law is the simmering dispute between news publishers and search engines. News publishers are concerned that search engines are “free riding” on their content by letting users view it in search results instead of on news publishers’ own sites (particularly those behind a pay wall, such as the Wall Street Journal and Financial Times).
News publishers had tried to address this problem by defining a technical standard called ACAP (Automated Content Access Protocol), which publishers could use to define rules by which search engines could index content and display it in search results. ACAP is a set of HTML metatags that specify things like the duration of a search engine’s right to index the content (say, a week after publication) or how it can show the content in search results (say, only a snippet or thumbnail). It’s not a DRM scheme; search engines could simply ignore the tags.
It’s now evident that search engines have no intention of adopting ACAP. It’s not hard to understand why: there’s little incentive for them to do so.
Instead, the Associated Press announced hNews, its own “microformat” standard for tagging news content. In addition to their use as HNews tags also serve as “beacons” for web crawling technology that can detect AP stories where they aren’t licensed to be, such as on blogs or splogs (spam-blogs).
HNews is intended to solve a slightly different problem than ACAP, but it should have a better future, for the simple reason that it offers search engines (and other content aggregators) reasons to use it: hNews will also contain metadata about news content that should actually help search engines and aggregators do what they want to do. And it’s based on open standards related to Creative Commons, which gives it a world of potential applicability to the oceans of user-generated content out there.
The AP’s hNews initiative should dovetail well with the news industry’s renewed interest in direct monetization of content, now that online ad revenues have dried up. As the AP attempts to move the dialog between newsgatherers and search engines from lawsuits to widely applicable business models based on content discovery and licensing, it should help preserve the news industry’s viability over the long term.
French Court Finds Google Guilty over Book Scanning December 20, 2009
Posted by Bill Rosenblatt in Europe, Law, Publishing.2 comments
A court in France found Google guilty of copyright infringement for its unauthorized scanning of French books. Under the ruling, the company is liable for €300,000 (about US $427,000) plus €10,000 ($14,300) per day until Google removes all of the material in question from its French index and site. The ruling affects about 80,000 copyrighted books scanned in France.
During the past few years, France has been setting European trends on digital copyright law and policy — most recently regarding progressive-response legislation for unauthorized content uploaders. So how will this court ruling (assuming it survive’s Google’s appeal) affect Google’s book-scanning activities elsewhere in Europe?
One clue comes from a statement from one of the plaintiff’s lawyers that showing snippets of content in search results “is a bad representation of the works.” French copyright law contains the core concept of droit moral, or moral rights: the idea that the creator of a work has a say in how it is used beyond merely giving permission. A creator can object to an otherwise legal use of her work on moral grounds if she feels that the usage is derogatory or otherwise objectionable. Thus, the statement from the publishers’ attorney could foreshadow or underscore an accusation of infringement under le droit moral. This tactic may well apply elsewhere in Europe — even in the UK, which has completely different copyright law origins from France yet which adopted moral rights in 1988. (The US has no concept of moral rights in its copyright law.)
In other respects, France’s copyright law providers for copyright exemptions that are roughly equivalent to UK Fair Dealing and US Fair Use, thanks to the European Union Copyright Directive of 1996. But issues of how well-established national copyright laws interface with the latter new creature of the digital age are difficult to address. This case of French publishers versus Google will test those interfaces as the case makes its way through the appeals process.
Google Meets Harry Potter — Well Not Quite! December 3, 2009
Posted by Bill Jones in Europe, Publishing, UK.add a comment
Nearly midnight on Saturday evening two weeks ago I was given a personal tour of the Bodleian Library at Oxford University. I was at my cousin’s birthday party in the Divinity School, which was used as the infirmary in Harry Potter’s films – the Duke Humfrey’s Library was used as the Hogwarts library in the same films.
The Bodleian is one of the six (and was the first) copyright libraries in the UK. A copyright library is entitled to one of the first copies of every published work in UK, including manuscripts, books, journals, DVDs, CDs, film, etc. The library was opened in 1488, although a separate university library had existed since 1320. Following the usual local skirmishes in Europe at the time, Thomas Bodley rescued the library. It was Bodley who negotiated the “copyright library” concept. Today the library has four million items and is rapidly expanding.
Google is digitizing the total Bodleian collection following a 2006 agreement. It will be a long process, especially given the fragility of so much of the collection. They would appear to have scanned half a million titles already. Google is also digitizing national libraries in other countries.
The attendant copyright issues are now surfacing, now that politicians seem to have thought a bit more about the wisdom of this move. On the one hand one can see the attractions of having the world’s information online and having a massive digital library. But under guises of differing arguments, reactions are developing in the capitals of Europe.
Germany’s Angela Merkel has said that her government is opposed to this development, and the Paris courts have entered the fray on behalf of authors.
Now that the new EU structures are in place, one can see this becoming a major EU issue. The UK has already called for increased international cooperation in copyright matters. This has the making of a major copyright and commercial issue for all parties.
Its unlikely that Harry Potter can help and meet Google back in the Bodleian Library, but a bit of his magic may be required to solve the emerging issues in an acceptable timescale for commercial interest.
Bill Jones is CEO of Global Village Ltd.
European Union Enters New Phase of Government November 30, 2009
Posted by Bill Jones in Europe, Law.add a comment
The Lisbon Treaty, which strengthens the European Union’s central government, has been ratified by all 27 states and comes into force today. It creates a new set of relationships within Europe.
Whilst it’s commonly acknowledged that the Lisbon Agenda of nearly 10 years ago — with its wide ranging sets of objectives for the IT industries and technology — was too ambitious, the new constitution proposed at the time was transformed into a treaty and now comes into effect. This is a revamped EU.
Following my comments on this blog in June, the new EU is now a reality. It matters.
The two newly created formal posts of President of the European Council and High Representative for Foreign Affairs (and also Vice President of the European Council) have been filled.
The debate surrounding these appointments brought out the expectations for the roles. It appears that the heads of nation-states do not wish a President in the US style but more a chairman of a consensus-making Council. It’s unlikely that the current heads of states will wish a President to whom they look up as their appointed leader. At a time of economic challenges, the heads of the key nation-states of France, Germany, and Italy are center-right with an inclination to smaller government (like Republicans in the US). All the current indicators in UK are for a similar orientation after the elections due by June 6th of next year.
The principle of subsidiarity also holds.
Other EU institutions include The European Commission and European Parliament. All have a role to play in intellectual property and technology.
One of the articulated benefits of the new arrangements is more efficient internal workings for the EU. Progress of copyright and technology issues (as for all others) have hitherto been slowed by the cumbersome processes. This will now change.
By having an internal market of 500 million people, it makes the EU the 3rd largest internal market globally after China and India and ahead of the US. So economics is one of the powerful drivers of the EU. The intent is to create a platform for competing with the US and BRIC countries (Brazil, Russia, China, India) on innovation and cost.
The EU already has significant technology R&D programs as well as competence and activities in Intellectual Property. The R&D programs are wide ranging and include many programs of interest to this blog. They also include programs on standards and new architectures.
The EU as well as its nation-states (i.e. peer group representation) also has representations in WTO, G8, G20 and at the UN, as well as others, within which Intellectual Property and Technology may play a part to a greater or lesser extent.
So what does this mean for businesses trading with and within the EU?
While naive businesses may ignore the power and role of nation states and head for the “center,” practical businesses will have to understand the nuances and dynamics between the role of the EU and the role of the nation states.
Whatever emerges on copyright and technology will not be a top-down approach, although the instruments are there to give effect to directives and EU laws, and the tendency of a bureaucracy will be in that direction. Instead, consensus will be required between nations before any EU approach will emerge. And in that there remains significant differences between nations on these issues.
Bill Jones is CEO of Global Village Ltd.
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