Free movement of creative content: policy options for dealing with the territorial nature of copyright for online services

The European Union wants to complete the Single Market. One of the niches of this market is content related services on the internet. This market offers a huge diversity of creative and cultural services like Video-on-Demand, file-sharing, streaming and downloading of music, videos and other copyright protected content. The creators and producers of creative content can give licenses to service providers who want to use this content for their services. These licences are awarded on a territorial basis. The territoriality of copyright can be seen as an obstacle to the completion of the Single Market. In this thesis the question “How can the problem of territoriality in the field of copyright and related rights in the European Union be solved for content related services offered over the internet?” is raised and answered. It shows that the market is homogeneous, and therefore the demand for the types licenses varies. Sometimes there is demand for national based licenses, but from other providers demands for pan- European licences come. For this research I made use of the contributions to public consultation of the European Commission on the Green Paper on the online distribution of audiovisual works in the European Union. This gave a valuable insight to the different positions of stakeholders and experts, from all over Europe. This reseach concludes with suggestions for a flexible copyright regime, whereby market demands can be fullfilled.