The politics of the digital single market:Culture vs. competition vs. copyright

This paper examines the implications for European music culture of the European Union’s Digital Single Market strategy. It focuses on the regulatory framework being created for the management of copyright policy, and in particular the role played by Collective Management Organisations (or Collecting Societies). One of the many new opportunities created by digitalization has been the music streaming services. These depend on consumers being able to access music wherever they are, but such a system runs counter to the management of rights on a national basis and through collecting organisations who act as monopolies within their own territories. The result has been ‘geo-blocking’. The EU has attempted to resolve this problem in a variety of ways, most recently in a Directive designed to reform the CMOs. In this paper, we document these various efforts, showing them to be motivated by a deep-seated and persisting belief in the capacity of ‘competition’ to resolve problems that, we argue, actually lie elsewhere - in copyright policy itself. The result is that the EU’s intervention fails to address its core concern and threatens the diversity of European music culture by rewarding those who are already commercially successful

Legal reform to enhance global text and data mining research:Outdated copyright laws around the world hinder research

Researchers engaged in text and data mining (TDM) research collect vast amounts of digitized material and use software to analyze and extract information from it. TDM is a crucial first step to many machine learning, digital humanities, and social science applications, addressing some of the world’s greatest scientific and societal challenges, from predicting and tracking COVID-19 to battling hate speech and disinformation. Although applications of TDM often occur across borders, with researchers, subjects, and materials in more than one country, a patchwork of copyright laws across jurisdictions limits where and how TDM research can occur. With the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) Standing Committee on Copyright and Related Rights, and legislatures around the world, deliberating the harmonization of copyright exceptions for various research uses, we discuss policy measures that can ensure that TDM research is unambiguously authorized under copyright law