Monthly Archives

January 2015

European Copyright Society Pursues Unification of European Copyright Law in Open Letter

By News

19th December 2014 – CREATe director Prof Martin Kretschmer and Investigator Prof Estelle Derclaye are among members of the European Copyright Society (ECS) which has approached the new Commissioner for Digital Economy and Society seeking unification of copyright law in the European Union. Following earlier calls for improvements to EU rules on copyright law the Society emphasised in their open letter to Mr Günther Oettinger that the time was right to develop a European law with uniform and direct applicability across the Union.

The Society cited territoriality associated with the existing national approach to copyright law, causing an associated fragmentation of markets along national boundaries, restricting the emergence of a Digital Single Market for creative content and undermining international competitiveness.

The Society accepted the challenges associated with achieving unification, conceding that it would be a medium to long-term objective, but urged Mr. Oettinger to dismiss the arguments of those equating time-consuming with ‘unrealistic’.

Download the European Copyright Society’s Open Letter to Mr Oettinger.

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No end in sight?: Football, Vines and Value

By Blog

Professor Raymond Boyle from the Centre for Cultural Policy Research at the University of Glasgow leads CREATe’s Work Package on Copyright, Football and European Media Rights. His blog below summarises several aspects of IP and licensing within the sport media environment. A full article from the project will appear in Media, Culture and Society in April 2015.


footballThe demise in the value of television rights for live football has been long predicted. Yet the successive rights deals in the case of the FA Premier League (FAPL) continue to disprove this. The current three year deal that ends shortly was worth £1.78billion.

In just over the twenty years since its creation the FAPL has helped launch and sustain the UK pay-Tv platform BSkyB. Forget all the talk about first run movies, its exclusive live sport, or, more accurately live English football that has helped position Sky as wealthiest broadcaster in the UK.

While Sky and the FAPL have re-written the rule book regarding how sport gets covered on television in the last couple of decades, so too the internet and digital technologies have transformed the media landscape and how we consume mediated football. Pay-Tv was a business model built on aggressive promotion, subscription, protection of content and above all exclusivity of rights. In contrast, the age of social media is characterized by mobility and sharing information and content, anytime, any place.

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