In 2009, two European commissioners proposed “Cross-Border Net Copyright” to EU for hearing. The idea comes from the complexity of selling digital content in 27 European countries. Obviously, no on-line content dealers will be happy with satisfying requirements from 27 copyright laws. “Apple, which do sell music and video across E.U. borders, have been required to sell the songs at different prices in different countries, a reflection of varying copyright fees.”(O’Brien, 2009) The new proposal seems to ease digital content dealers’ job, protect the copyrighted products and hopefully decrease the sell price.
While the idea of cross-border copyright is getting popular in EU, it’s less common in other countries where business owners have strong lobby power. One of the cases is “WIPO Treaty for Sharing Accessible Formats of Copyrighted Works for Persons Who are Blind or Have other Reading Disabilities.” (Kravets, 2009) The proposal of the treaty is designed to open a window for visual disabilities under tightened copyright law. However, many of the American enterprises, especially the book publishers opposite this international treaty because this treaty widely loosening the copyright restrictions. “Under these circumstances, publishers not unreasonably hesitate and wonder whether they can expect such a market to flourish when potential customers would still have the option of relying upon a statutory exception to get an accessible version of a work without having to pay for it,” the association’s vice president, Allan Adler. The concerns from the proprietary companies are understandable. After all, their mission is to make profit.
From the above two cases, we realize the needs of Cross-Border sharing of copyright. The digital age has made this trend inevitable challenging the current copyright principal. Should the non-profit attitude be taken into the consideration of copyright principal? If not, how do we solve the problem that affects disabilities who needs and deserves the protections from the international community? Maybe we should reexamine the spirit of copyright. The case of “Amazon turn off the function of reading a book aloud” has taught us how crazy the current copyright is.
relevant sources:
(wiki, 2010) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cross-border_injunction
(Kravets, 2009) http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2009/12/blind_block/
(O’Brien, 2009) http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/05/business/global/copyright.html?_r=1
{ 1 } Comments
This is interesting short posting but clear and significant for international copyright issue.
Here is more related issue for that which makes more sense about cross-border copyright. To understand this, I assumed that we already know about ACTA (Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement).
Some countries already conduct border searches of electronic devices without probable cause. In July 2008, the United States Department of Homeland Security disclosed that its border search policies allow U.S. Customs and Border Protection agents to conduct random searches of electronic devices for “information concerning terrorism, narcotics smuggling, and other national security matters; alien admissibility; contraband including child pornography, monetary instruments, and information in violation of copyright or trademark laws; and evidence of embargo violations or other import or export control laws.” US Senator Russell Feingold called the policies “truly alarming” and proposed to introduce legislation to require reasonable suspicion of illegality and to prohibit racial profiling. The Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals has previously upheld the constitutionality of laptop searches without reasonable suspicion at border crossings.
An ACTA fact sheet updated in November 2008, published by the European Commission states:
“ACTA is not designed to negatively affect consumers: the EU legislation (2003 Customs Regulation) has a de minimis clause that exempts travellers from checks if the infringing goods are not part of large scale traffic. EU customs, frequently confronted with traffics of drugs, weapons or people, do neither have the time nor the legal basis to look for a couple of pirated songs on an i-Pod music player or laptop computer, and there is no intention to change this.”
If ACTA is confirmed surely, cross-border copyright issue might be on more flexible and usable table.