Copyright Reconstructed: Rethinking Copyright’s Economic Rights in a Time of Highly Dynamic Technological and Economic Change

Copyright Reconstructed is the result of a collaborative research project, ‘Reconstructing Rights’ funded by Microsoft Europe, that normatively examined the core economic rights protected under EU copyright law, with the aim of realigning these rights with economic and technological realities. It follows an interdisciplinary approach, combining economic and legal methods. The book presents various concurring future models of ‘reconstructed’ copyright law. The historical evolution of copyright has led to a growing disconnect between the legal definitions of economic rights and the business and technological realities they regulate, eroding copyright’s normative content and distorting the scope of its economic rights.

What’s in this book:

This book is structured as follows. Following a historical chapter that illustrates how a structure of media-specific economic rights has developed in international copyright law as copyright’s catalogue of rights, a number of alternative models for reconstructing rights are presented in the form of chapters by Europe’s most respected copyright scholars and economists focusing on potentially copyright-relevant acts that lie at the borders of exclusive rights:

• digital resale;
• private copying;
• hyperlinking and embedding;
• cable retransmission; and
• text and data mining.

Offering the most incisive current thinking on copyright’s economic rights in an increasingly networked world where acts of usage of works occur on a global or regional scale rather than on a purely national territorial basis, this book will be of immeasurable value not only to academics but also to practitioners and professionals in intellectual property law. This book guides copyright lawyers and scholars in the fields of international and EU copyright law in understanding the nexus between copyright law and technological and economic change. It also helps lawmakers and judges at the European, national and international levels formulate legislative responses to the challenges of the digital environment.