In spring 2011, the Commission published a Green Paper on the online distribution of audiovisual works – for example, films and television programmes. It challenges us to consider if legislative amendments are necessary in order for the European industries to develop new business models, content producers to have access to new distribution channels and European consumers to have better possibilities of using content everywhere in Europe.
In its statement to the Ministry of Education and Culture, the Finnish Consumer Agency considers that the Green Paper on audiovisual works gives a good picture of the prevailing situation. The internal market in the EU remains fragmented in many places, and the content offered in one Member State is not necessarily accessible to consumers living in other Member States.
As one reason for this fragmentation, the Green Paper cites a lack of consumer confidence in cross-border trade. The Finnish Consumer Agency stresses that the confidence felt by Finnish consumers in service providers located in other Member States and cross-border online trade is significantly higher than that of European consumers on average, as indicated by the latest EU Consumer Markets Scoreboard.
Challenges and opportunities
This subject is associated with unclear copyright issues that are currently being debated. For consumers, key questions and phenomena include at least the wider spread of online TV and various subscriber-based services (e.g. video on-demand), the position of user-centred content and the wider spread of cloud services. Content created by users themselves can be found in social media services (for example, Facebook and blogs) or in various file and video sharing services. In the audiovisual field, too, streaming services like Spotify are likely to become more common in the future.
In the Finnish Consumer Agency’s opinion, exceptions in the copyrights and harmonising restrictions within the EU would be a good starting point for clarifying the position of consumers. Harmonising the reproduction and modification rights of end users would be a concrete example of this. The European Commission, among others, has at times referred to such harmonisation, and it is also brought up in the Green Paper.
Improved legal certainty by registration?
The Finnish Consumer Agency finds interesting the idea taken up in the Green Paper of registering copyrights pertaining to an audiovisual work. As an exception to other intellectual property rights, a copyright is created without registration or other measures. For end users of audiovisual works, registration could provide improved legal certainty, if they could check a uniform register to find out who holds the title to the work and from whom permission to use the work may be obtained.
The Green Paper is part of the Europe 2020 strategy and the Digital Agenda.
KUV/8237/48/2011
Green Paper, COM (2011) 427 final