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EC sets out plan for intellectual property reform

By | Published on Wednesday 25 May 2011

European Commission

The European Union’s Internal Markets Commissioner Michel Barnier yesterday set out plans to overhaul intellectual property rules across the European Union, with most of the proposals focused on well-trodden issues, including online piracy and the simplification of pan-European digital licensing.

Among the proposals are plans to introduce common rules for collecting societies, in theory making it easier for organisations that want to license digital rights on a pan-European basis.

Digital service providers have long bemoaned that the licensing framework for multi-territory services is far too complicated. In theory it is simpler if rights owners license their music via collecting societies (which the record labels don’t, but the music publishers, in many cases, do), though for pan-European services that approach can be even more tedious, because traditionally collecting societies only ever license you in one territory, meaning you need to do 27 collecting society deals to cover publishing rights across Europe.

The European Commission has, for some time, been pressuring the music publishing sector to enable its collecting societies to license on a pan-European basis, and in doing so to compete with each other, though some would argue efforts to date have, if anything, made the whole process even more complicated. It remains to be seen whether the EC’s plans for ‘common rules’ will improve things, and whether the collecting societies will embrace those proposals or fight them.

While putting ever more pressure on the music industry to simplify pan-European licensing, the EC is also planning on stepping up its efforts to fight online piracy. The European Union has not, so far, got especially involved in the crackdown on file-sharing and suchlike, generally leaving this to member states to sort out for themselves. In fact, in the European Parliament at least, there has actually been talk of the EU stepping in to do the opposite, ie introducing European laws that limit the extent of some of the anti-piracy frameworks being put in place by individual governments, such as in France.

But yesterday Barnier said the European Commission would start to look into what role it can play in cracking down on piracy on a pan-European basis, saying that “all options” were on the table, and that commissioners would, among other things, be giving time to considering what role the internet service providers should be playing in the fight against online copyright infringement. The proposals also suggest giving more powers in this area to the European Observatory On Counterfeiting & Piracy.

Elsewhere in the IP domain, Barnier said he remained committed to introducing a Europe-wide patent, something the UK government’s Hargreaves Review said should be a priority earlier this month too.



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