EU, Finland
IP-Law
Conference proceedings IRIS 2022
Citation: Jelizaveta Juřičková, The shifting landscape of copyright: Exploring the needs of modern creators, in: Jusletter IT 30. Juni 2022
This paper is an attempt to develop initial thoughts on a new growing class of authors designated as non-institutionalized creators. After a brief characteristic of non-institutionalized creators and an outline of their socioeconomic impact, we focused on identifying the principal needs of non-institutionalized creators which can be satisfied by means of favourable settings of law. We formulated two needs that are a conditio sine qua non for their successful activities on online platforms – to reach their audience and to be adequately remunerated for their creative efforts. Given the fact that creators often borrow from existing works, benefitting from legitimate uses such as exceptions to copyright, the main obstacle to fulfilment of the first need is tendency of platforms to excessively block legitimate content, exacerbated by Article 17 of the DSM Directive. Seeing as the issue of overblocking was a subject of extensive academic debate and there exists a prolific body of literature on the topic, discussion in the paper is limited to examining one possible solution to alleviate the problem, which was presented by the Finnish Ministry of Culture in the course of efforts to transpose the DSM Directive. As regards the need for adequate remuneration, unsuitability of traditional remuneration schemes under collective management is considered which arises from the difference between offline and online environment and technological advance that sets prerequisites for a remuneration model based on direct evidence for the number and manner of uses of copyright-protected work. Next comes an analysis of means to achieve this objective – connecting metadata regarding rights to works and their user metrics on online platforms. Once the metadata are aligned, there is room for building an open-access registry which can be used to create direct licensing solutions for authors of all sizes, including the non-institutionalized creators.
