French Socialist MEP Françoise Castex published her draft report on private copying levies on 9 October. The biggest question that the document raises is... are you serious, Ms Castex?

The policy issue being addressed is that “creators” are meant to be “compensated” for private copies that are made of legally acquired content, such as music or printed material. In some EU countries, there are no levies, in some EU countries there are low levels of levies.

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Deutsch: ENDitorial: Europäische Lizenzen und der Fight Club ... es gibt nur e...

There was a moment in November 2012 when even the most cynical observers of the European Commission were hopeful of an effective reform of copyright. Commissioner Barnier gave a speech where he demonstrated that he understood the problems. He explained that “the digital revolution has not yet lived up to expectations in the European context” and described some barriers to cross-border access to content as illegitimate. Finally, the problems had been identified.

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Deutsch: Deutschland: Debatte um Leistungsschutzrecht

The Judiciary Committee of the German Bundestag held on 30 January 2013 an expert hearing on the proposed “Leistungsschutzrecht” (LRS, known also as “ancillary copyright”) law for news publishers which will require search engines and others to ask permission from news publishers to link to their content or even give summarize news content.

The draft law was criticized by civil society groups as well as the German association of Internet economy which pointed out the lack of clarity of the terms used in the text and the negative effects that

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Deutsch: EDRi zur geplanten Richtlinie über kollektive Rechteverwertung

On 11 July 2012, the European Commission published a proposal for a Directive on collective management of copyright and related rights and multi-territorial licensing of rights in musical works for online uses in the internal market.

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Deutsch: Kommission will Verwaltung von Musikrechten ändern

The European Commission (EC) published a draft EU Directive on 11 July 2012 showing the intention to introduce a system of collective rights management to be used for the distribution of music online in the single market.

In the EC’s opinion, the collecting societies can issue a licence for the Internet use of a songwriter or composer's work, but some only do so for one country.

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Deutsch: Youtube verliert im Fall gegen GEMA

A German court decided on 20 April 2012 that YouTube was indirectly liable for the copyrighted content posted by its users in a case brought to court in 2010 by the royalty collective society Gema.

In this case, the defendant argued that it was not liable as it only provided the hosting platform for its users.

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Deutsch: Portugal: Abgaben auf Privatkopien geplant

A draft law proposed by the Portuguese Socialist Party (PS) in December 2011 is intended to set broad, exponentially increasing levies on digital storage devices with the support of collective rights entities like the portugese authors guild (SPA) and a collective society for the management of private copy (AGECOP).

Taxes are introduced on all digital storage equipment, from hard and solid storage disks at 2 eurocents/GB and 2,5 eurocents/GB for every GB over 1TB, memory cards at 6 eurocents/GB, to telephones and other devices not specifically list

SABAM (Société Belge des Auteurs, Compositeurs et Editeurs), the Belgian collecting society for music royalties, is in the spotlight again. A few months after the Scarlet/SABAM case, the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) has released a new decision on the legality of filtering systems on the Internet, this time with regard to filtering of content stored on web services.

Today, the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) ruled that a social network “cannot be obliged to install a general filtering system, covering all its users, in order to prevent the unlawful use of musical and audio-visual work”.