Copyright Reconstructed: Rethinking Copyright's Economic Rights in a Time of Highly Dynamic Technological and Economic Change

The historical evolution of copyright has led to a growing disconnect between the legal definitions of economic rights and the business and technological realities they regulate, eroding copyright’s normative content and distorting the scope of its economic rights. This book, which consolidates the results of a major trans-European research project funded by Microsoft Europe, re-examines the core economic rights protected under EU copyright law, with the aim of bringing these rights more in line with economic and technological realities.

Pursuing an interdisciplinary approach combining economic and legal methods, nine of Europe’s most respected copyright scholars and economists present a variety of models for reconstructing copyright’s economic rights, focusing on five potentially copyright-relevant acts that lie at the borders of exclusive rights:

• - digital resale;
• - private copying;
• - hyperlinking and embedding;
• - cable retransmission; and
• - text and data mining.

Offering the most incisive current thinking on copyright’s economic rights in an increasingly networked world where acts of usage of works occur on a global or regional scale rather than on a purely national territorial basis, this book will be of immeasurable value not only to academics but also to practitioners and professionals in intellectual property law, scholars in the fields of international and EU copyright law, and lawmakers and judges at the EU, national and international levels.