[A2k] EU Commission working hard on global IP licensing

[Anne-Catherine Lorrain]

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/01/04/ec_single_digital_media_market


    EU's online Red Tape pledge

While many scare stories about EU regulation turn out to be myths -
here's one that unlike "bendy bananas" may well come true.

Europe's most powerful quango, the European Commission, says it wants to
accelerate a "single market" for online music, film, and games - and is
threatening legislation to bring it about. Although the EU's Telecoms
commissioner Viviane Reding sees the market for digital entertainment
quadrupling (to =808.3bn by 2010), she feels the bureaucrats need to get
involved anyway.

In a statement issued yesterday, the EC identified four areas for action
- with the most ominous being a good behaviour pledge for online service
providers.

Content creators should be able to license material for use across
Europe in one go, says the EC. So says everyone else - and it's a call
we've heard for over a decade now. Licensing is currently a labyrinthine
process - but progress is slowly and painfully being made.

Two years ago, the EC commenced formal anti-trust proceedings against
CISAC, the global umbrella group representing authors' collection
societies. The wrangle is currently over rates. Naturally, large media
companies want to drive the rates down as low as they possibly can. The
EC would love to dismantle the national collection societies, and
appoint a sub-quango to do the job itself.

Two other areas concern the availability of material. The EC is
"strongly encouraging stakeholders to find innovative and collaborative
solutions to exploit the market for content online" - uh, huh - while
insisting that the DRM technology used is interoperable and clearly
marked. Here the bureaucrats are flapping their arms about, as a
substitute for doing some serious thinking.

But ominously for ISPs and service providers, the EC plans to introduce
red tape, or what it calls "co-operation procedures" and "codes of
conduct" "between access/service providers, right holders and consumers
to ensure not only the widespread offer of attractive content online,
but also adequate protection of copyrighted works, and close cooperation
on the fight against piracy and unauthorised file-sharing".

This strategy would look broken had it been announced in 1995, when the
commission might (just) have been forgiven for believing that walled
garden services such as CompuServe would be the way we consumed digital
media on home PCs. To read it in 2008 is quite bizarre.

So instead of imagining an economy where DRM isn't necessary, and where
both consumers and rights holders can flourish, the EC has opted to
regulate the stable door - long after the horse has bolted.

The commission is really seeking to carve out a permanent regulatory
role for itself (and in the case of royalty collection, a
revenue-raising opportunity) where today it's evident that such an extra
layer of regulation is quite unnecessary. The rest is simply a pious
serenade of good intentions. ISPs, who are already on guard against the
Meddling Ms Reding, won't find much comfort in this. =AE

--
Anne-Catherine Lorrain
aclorrain@gmail.com
+33 688 686 004
http://www.aclorrain.fr
http://www.generationmp3.com/catalyseurs-numeriques