The last year will surely be remembered as one of the most prolific, for the debate over copyright protection online, both in court rooms and in research institutes.
Among the many contributions of doctrine, it is very interesting to note a report by the European Audiovisual Observatory, redacted in late june 2011, available at the following address: http://www.obs.coe.int/oea_publ/iris/iris_plus/iplus4LA_2011.pdf.en
.
The author of such article, Francisco Javier Cabrera Blázquez, focuses on the comparation of the two main streams of contribution to make private copies:
- the so-called “fair compensation”, especially related to the levy on blank medias, one of the most adopted measures in the EU, with all the necessary limits of proportionality and adequateness, as stated also by the Padawan v. SGAE case (European Court of Justice, case C-467/07, decided the 21rst of October 2010, available at the address: http://curia.europa.eu/jurisp/cgi-bin/gettext.pl?where=&lang=en&num=79898978C19080467&doc=T&ouvert=T&seance=ARRET);
such measure entails a necessary unpopularity rate among the public, but is
largely tolerated.
- the “file-sharing levy”, considered by some experts as a way to spread on every internet user the costs of piracy, decriminalizing file-sharing of copyrighted material, and implementing a general tax on internet connection, to raise funds for cultural development. Application of a similar measure, if effectively realizing more cashflow in the short period, is however extremely dangerous to maintain in the long period, since it might bring to a higher rate of piracy and so progressively dry up cultural production, highly penalizing those artists and productors it should instead help supporting.
In any case, the analisys of the European Audiovisual Observatory offers a view
that, if not updated to the latest trends and policies in the EU, still highlists the fact that very few has been done in Europe, during the last years, to properly boost up legal distribution of multimedial works on the web: it seems, indeed, that legislators are still stuck patronizing afflictive measures that, instead of helping, backstab those categories (productors, artists, musicians and so on) it should help.