During the 2012 Intellectual Property and Innovation Summit, held in Brussels last 10th September, the European Commissioner for Digital Agenda, Neelie Kroes, strongly underlined, during her speech, the need of a modernization of the Copyright Directive. That Directive was adopted in 2001. The Commission proposals it was based on date back to 1998. But, during this last 15 years, the sector underwent enormous changes. Let’s remind that a social network like Facebook (in 1998 Zuckerberg was fourteen, today almost 1 billion people around the world use Facebook) or YouTube (today, 1 hour video is uploaded every seconds), at the end of last Century, didn’t exist. And the same was for the music sector. At the end of the Ninetyes, music was listened on the radio or cd; today the phisical support is going to disappear thanks to innovation:
streaming and downloading. Kroes, concluded her speech encouraging to act: “Let’s
act right now: for artists, consumers, for our economy.

Meanwhile in the Usa, it seems to be ready what is defined “The Us Hadopi”. The measure is based on 6 strikes and aims to punish the illegal downloading and file sharing. Jill Lesser, head of the new “Center for Copyright Information” wants to underline that this measure will be useful only for educative purposes and so is very different from the French law Hadopi. At the moment is really difficult make a comment because it seems quite impossible have more information. The (declared) aim is to let young people understand the risks of the illegal downloading. But, obviously, there will be punishments for the violators, established by the different operators.

Back to Europe, the French Hadopi is still very discussed. When François Hollande
was elected as new French President, the Hadopi started to weaver. And the future of the “Haute Autorité” seems to be uncertain. But the controversy aroused again the day after the first sentence: 150 euros as punishment for a 40 years man accused of illegal music downloading. “What is the sense of a so expensive bureaucratic machine (11 million euros a year) if the results are so “weak”? is the question posed by the French Ministry of Culture, Aurelie Filippetti.