The Many Metamorphoses of Related Rights in EU Copyright Law: Unintended Consequences or Inevitable Developments?

Abstract

Neighboring rights have always been neglected by copyright scholars, despite their economic relevance and market role have steadily increased across the decades. The situation has changed in the past two decades when, in response to the epochal shifts such entitlements have been subject to,. commentators have shifted their focus to their legislative and judicial evolutions of neighboring rights. These changes, in fact, have had a substantial impact on the texture of EU copyright law and of the common core of EU Member States laws, which may – or may not – represent the beginning of a new era for the relationship between copyright and related rights. To grasp drivers and sense of the various legislative reforms and CJEU’s responses in the field, and to understand the challenges they have posed to the consistency and internal balance of the EU copyright system, it is essential to analyze their roots and key features. To this end, this article will offer a brief overview of the legislative path that led from the Rome Convention to the debate preceding the CDSMD, with a focus on the introduction of sui generis rights and ancillary copyright (§2). Then, it will comment on nature and features of the new press publisher right under Article 15 CDSMD, focusing on its strengths and pitfalls (§3). The statutory analysis will be coupled with a comment on the four “waves” of the CJEU case law (§4), leading to a brief assessment and conclusions on the way forward (§5).

Keywords: neighboring rights, sui generis right, press publishers right, ancillary copyright, CJEU, harmonization

JEL Classification: K11, O34