Apr
01
Wednesday
The concept of 'public' in copyright law
Series: Part of The City Law School research seminar series.
This talk will discuss what amounts to an actionable communication of
copyright works to the public. Recent rulings of the Court of Justice of
the European Union uphold that infringement takes place not only where
an unauthorised communication reaches the public but also where a
communication is addressed to a «new public», i.e. a public that
copyright holders had not taken into account when authorising the
initial communication of the work. This newly developed doctrine does
not refer to a public or a private circle in a copyright sense, but
develops a sui generis legal fiction that fundamentally changes the
communication right; it both restricts and expands its scope in ways
that were not foreseen when the right was first introduced in
international law, European copyright and the national laws of Member
States. In its unnecessary complexity and complicated logic that
challenges the credibility of copyright, the concept of the “new public”
indicates that the extremely broad scope of the communication right is
unworkable and counterproductive, and invites a principle-based approach
in examinations of infringement.
Stavroula Karapapa is Associate Professor of Intellectual Property Law at the University of Reading School of Law and the co-Director of the Centre for Commercial Law and Financial Regulation at the University of Reading.
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