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.
Top Stories
European Commission launch internet rights guide
By CMU Editorial | Published on Thursday 7 May 2009
The European Commission yesterday launched a new website telling consumers all about their digital rights, which includes a section on downloading and copyright.
The eYouGuide has been set up in response to a call by the European Parliament in 2007 who asked that the Commission better advise European citizens on their rights as internet consumers. On file-sharing, the guide advises that unless people know for certain a track available via a file-sharing network is out of copyright or under some kind of royalty free licence then they shouldn’t download it, because doing so will probably infringe someone’s copyright.
It adds that copyright exists “to promote the progress of knowledge and arts”, and warns that in some European countries copyright law may “provide civil or criminal sanctions even for infringements of copyright for non-commercial purposes”. It says that civil sanctions “may involve paying damages or just an injunction ordering you to stop the infringing behaviour”, while criminal sanctions, normally reserved for infringement for commercial gain, they note, may include “the seizure of devices containing protected work, fines and in some extreme cases also imprisonment”.
Common sense, many of you out there in CMU land may think, but you’d be surprised how little the average consumer knows about such things, which is part of the problem in terms of combating online infringement. So in that respect the new EU guide is probably a good thing, assuming anyone ever reads it. Though I’m not sure the “to promote the progress of knowledge and arts” line is the best way to convince the average file-sharer that copyrights are something they should respect, it’s a bit too bold a statement to ring true.
Launching the site, the EU Commissioner For Information Society & Media Viviane Reding said the guide was part of the Commission’s attempts to ensure web users across Europe have and are aware of the same rights. In the same vein, they published a digital agenda encouraging European governments and businesses to work to ensure more consistency regarding internet rights and rules across the Union.
Reding: “In the EU, consumer rights online should not depend on where a company or website is based. National borders should no longer complicate European consumers’ lives when they go online to buy a book or download a song. In spite of progress made, we need to ensure that there is a single market for consumers as well as businesses on the web”.
The aspects of the ‘digital agenda’ most relevant to the music business are probably a call for Union-wide consistency on the issue of private copying and more pan-European licensing.
The former, of course, is about whether or not you should have the right to make private copies of tracks you have bought so you can listen to them on another device (eg rip a track from a CD to a PC) and whether content owners should be compensated for such coping. In the UK all private copying is currently, technically speaking, illegal. In many European countries it is allowed but a private copying levy has traditionally been charged on the sales of recordable media – eg blank tapes and CDRs – which is passed onto content owners. There are moves to make private copying legal in the UK – given everyone does it anyway – though the music industry is pushing for some confusing quasi-levy system which complicates what could be a simple deletion of a clause of the Copyright Act.
The latter issue – the need for more pan-European licensing – is one of the European Commission’s favourite grumbles. The collecting societies are normally the main targets in that domain. EC types feel current collecting society systems, where societies have (or had) virtual licensing monopolies in their own territories, are anti-competitive, and blanket licences should be available from any one society for the whole of the European Union. Such a move would make it easier to licence music for pan-European services, and force national societies to compete with each other. The collecting societies, for their part, say that the EU’s proposals for pan-European licensing will actually make the whole royalties world less competitive, and also negatively impact on the societies, and therefore music communities, of smaller nations. Or something like that.
