THE STATE OF THE EUROPEAN UNION

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PROGRESS TOWARDS A EUROPEAN DIGITAL SINGLE MARKET IN 2014
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regulations throughout the European Union.
We describe some of the most important of
these actions below.
Copyright and data protection
In respect to the issue of copyright in a single
market, the European Commission originally
planned to publish a white paper that year. The
purpose of publishing this document was to
summarize the current legislation, identifying
possible problems in order to facilitate an un-
derstanding of the issues and to propose possi-
ble solutions.
The first stage was a public consultation 1
about a possible revision of the European copy-
right legislation. This consultation ran from 5
December 2013 to 5 March 2014, received over
9,500 responses, and prompted over 11,000
messages contributing opinions, complaints and
suggestions. In addition to the responses to the
public consultation, the European Commission
has commissioned a range of reports on the
copyright situation and its impact in recent
years2 and organized a multistakeholder meet-
ing during 2013 under the title Licences for
Europe.
The white paper was originally scheduled for
publication by mid-2014 but has been delayed.
All that is known about this possible reform
comes from what appears to be a draft of the
document3 (“A copyright policy for Creativity
and Innovation in the European Union”) leaked
1
copyright-rules/docs/contributions/consultation-report_
en.pdf
2
index_en.htm
3
Paper%20%28internal%20draft%29%20%281%29.PDF
in June. This document focuses on three objec-
tives, analysing the current situation and pro-
posing possible paths of action.
It starts by analysing the problem of the lack
of an European copyright, which means that
currently content is protected by one of the 28
national legislative frameworks instead. One of
the consequences of this is that users are unable
to access certain content when they are travel-
ling in a Member State, even when the user is
subscribed to the content in his/her country of
origin. It was to mitigate this situation that
Directive 2014/26/EU4 was approved on 26th
February 2014 to address the problem of grant-
ing multi-territorial licensing of rights to musical
works for online use by content management
organizations.
The second aspect the white paper considers
is how to harmonize copyright policies with oth-
er public policies. The public policies analysed in
this section include: applying rights in browsing
and hyperlinking; harnessing new possibilities in
education and research; improving access to in-
formation for people with a disability; and pri-
vate copying and the single market.
Finally, this document analyses the copyright
market and the value chain to ensure its optimal
functioning, and to ensure fair remuneration for
authors and performers.
The text does not mention the need for ma-
jor regulatory reform at European level, instead
proposing a set of measures to adapt existing
legislation in specific areas to achieve greater
harmonization.
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