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Copyright, related rights and the news in the EU: ‘Why are we here?’

746 views · Published 29 April 2016 · 1:17:41 · Indexed 22 September 2026

Channel: Cambridge Law Faculty · 2016 · Education

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Session 1: Why are we here? What problems face news publishers? Why is this important? Why might we expect a new European copyright or related law to help resolve them?  Professor Ian Hargreaves (University of Cardiff) chairs a panel discussing these issues, comprised of Dr Richard Danbury  (University of Cambridge), Professor Dr Jan Hegemann (Raue LLP), Matt Rogerson (The Guardian), Andrew J Hughes (NLA Media Access, speaking in a personal capacity), Mark Seeley (RELX).

Slides for this session are available at:

http://resources.law.cam.ac.uk/cipil/documents/copyright_related_rights_and_the_news_in_the_eu/slidesNewsCopyrightconference(v.1).pdf

This is a recording of a conference entitled "Conference: Copyright, related rights and the news in the EU: Assessing potential new laws" held on Saturday 23rd April 2016 at the University of Amsterdam.

The difficulties of commercial journalism

Like music and other branches of publishing, commercial news journalism has faced radical challenges over the last two decades. There is talk of the "death of the newspaper" and questions have been raised about the very future of journalism. While with music, books and films, the greatest threat to existing business models have been seen as the unauthorised and unremunerated home copying and peer-to-peer distribution, with commercial news journalism much of the challenge derives from the fact that advertising has not followed the shift of print-newspapers to the Internet. Such difficulties are compounded, from the point of view of news publishers, by the relatively free availability of news from other online sources. And they’ve been further compounded by the recent rise of social media, particularly Facebook, as a main route to the news.

Questions that arise

Is there sufficient rationale to alter copyright or related laws in a way that benefits news publishers? Should commercial news publishers benefit from any change in the law, given that other means exist for gathering and disseminating news? How strong is an economic case for such a right? To what extent is any economic case for change supplemented by other arguments, such as reward and natural rights arguments, and arguments about media plurality? Should European law treat news publishers in a similar way to other content producers, such as phonogram producers and broadcasters, who benefit from a related right? Would individual journalists benefit from a right afforded to news publishers, and if so, to what extent? Should news publishers benefit from levies and compensation schemes designed to benefit author-journalists?

A one day conference at IViR will seek to address these questions. The conference is part of a two-year, AHRC funded project at CIPIL, Cambridge University, entitled Appraising Potential Legal Responses to Threats to the Production of  News in a Digital Environment, which the IViR will kindly host and facilitate.

The conference brings together an interdisciplinary combination of academics and practitioners to discuss the issue. Representatives from news producing, publishing and disseminating organizations, both traditional and online, have been invited and speakers will include Andrew Hughes from the NLA Media Access. Academic speakers include Lionel Bently and John Naughton from Cambridge; Bernt Hugenholtz and Mireille van Eechoud from IViR; Ian Hargreaves from Cardiff University; Raquel Xalabarder (UOC Barcelona) and Jan Hegemann (FU Berlin).

For further information contact:
Dr Richard Danbury
Centre for Intellectual Property and Information Law,
University of Cambridge
[email protected]

More information: http://www.ivir.nl/newsconference2016

Shared under CC BY: CIPIL, University of Cambridge; IViR, University of Amsterdam; funded by AHRC grant H/L004704/1.

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