This website uses cookies so that we can provide you with the best user experience possible. Cookie information is stored in your browser and performs functions such as recognising you when you return to our website and helping our team to understand which sections of the website you find most interesting and useful.
Business News Legal
Consumer Focus file submission to EC’s digital rights consultation
By CMU Editorial | Published on Thursday 7 January 2010
Brace yourself people, it’s time for a story involving the European Union. Is it just me, or do you feel sleepy whenever the European Union is mentioned? And I’m generally quite pro-Europe. Anyway, Consumer Focus, so the old National Consumer Council but with extra post, has submitted a paper to the European Commission in response to the EC’s snappily-titled consultation document ‘Creative Content On A European Digital Single Market: Challenges For The Future’, which was published last year.
Among Consumer Focus’ ramblings is support for the EC’s proposal that a free-to-access online database be made available providing anyone who wants it with copyright ownership and licensing information for all content. If the submission of information into such a database by copyright owners was compulsory, of course, that’s basically a form of copyright registration, something that doesn’t currently exist in Europe.
Consumer Focus notes that there have been attempts to create some sort of licensing database before, but that issues of who owns, pays for and administers such a thing have never been successfully addressed.
For music, such a database essentially exists already within each national territory, in the form of data controlled by the collecting societies, so in the UK PRS for publishing-based copyrights and PPL for recording-based rights. However, the system proposed by the EC, and supported by Consumer Focus, would be multi-territory, and accessible by all. The consumer rights group notes that such a database might further encourage “multi-territory and multi-repertoire licensing, thus helping to overcome the current market fragmentation”.
On the issue of file-sharing and the like, Consumer Focus stands by its viewpoint that the industry’s failure to engage with enough legit digital music services is the key issue here, and proposes a move towards compulsory collective licensing of music for online services. As far as the consumer is concerned the former point doesn’t recently stack up anymore (there are plenty of engaging industry-licensed digital music services), though the latter point is increasingly well argued by a number of stakeholders.
