Efforts in the European Union to harmonize copyright law have resulted in a number of regulations, including the 2001 Directive on Copyright in the Information Society.

The Directive on the harmonisation of certain aspects of copyright and related rights in the information society (2001/29/EC) had two main objectives

  • To reflect technological developments in copyright law in Europe
  • To transpose into the law of all the EU countries the provisions in the two WIPO treaties of 1996.

The Directive harmonized across European Union Member States:

  • the rights of reproduction
  • distribution and communication to the public
  • legal protection of technical protection measures and rights management systems.

It also included an exhaustive list of limitations and exceptions to copyright, most of which optional for the Member States to implement in their national laws. A later study by the Institute for Information Law (Univ. of Amsterdam) concluded that those options provided to the Member States had substantially interfered with harmonization.

Another important piece of European legislation is the 2004 Directive on Enforcement of Intellectual Property Rights, which was followed by the creation in 2009, of the European Observatory on Counterfeiting and Piracy.

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