Copyright territoriality policy recommendations (ReCreating Europe project)

These policy recommendations are both the outcome and a starting point for further work on the complex issue of how the EU can navigate the territorial nature of copyright and related rights while pursuing a digital single market for creative industries.

As part fo the Recreating Europe H2020 project, the strand of work produced on territoriality included a scoping exercise of the various mechanisms in EU copyright law introduced specifically to overcome certain drawbacks of territorial rights in a single European market. That analysis showed that apart from the so-called exhaustion doctrine (which ensures the freedom of circulation of tangible copies of works), the most used mechanism in fictive localization, i.e. the use of a legal fiction that regards a particular act as taking place in one particular Member State (sometimes called 'country of origin approach).

The recommendations regarding the existing acquis focus on rules using fictive localization.
The more forward looking recommendations to come out of this project are based on the idea that considering the advanced level of harmonization and the needs of the internal market, the idea of a unitary copyright title (and titles for neighbouring rights) merits serious consideration. The recommendations address various steps to take and matters to consider.

Associated papers are:

• Mireille van Eechoud. (2022). D4.4 Territoriality Roundtables (combined report). Zenodo. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.7564660
• Mireille van Eechoud, Mireille, Romy van Es, (2021). D4.2 Report on EU policy space in light of international framework. Zenodo. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.5069608
• Mireille van Eechoud, & Romy van Es. (2021). D4.1 Territoriality scoping paper. Zenodo. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.5040173