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The European Union and its efforts concerning the harmonisation of copyright law

The increasingly accelerating process of integration in the whole European area causes a tremendous amount of problems in different sections of social, economic and political life. The solutions to all these integration related problems have one thing in common: they all need to be based on a solid ground of EU-laws, which are applied and enforced in every Member State. This so important because otherwise the measures taken by the EU institutions are completely useless. That leads to the observation that in every area of conflicts due to the application of different domestic laws a harmonisation is required. Harmonising EU laws adopted by the competent EU institutions have a crucial key role in the achievement of complete integration of every Member State in every conflict area, whatever that might be. One of these areas is the protection of copyrights. The value of the protection of copyrights must not be underestimated. The EU Commission assessed that the contribution of the copyright-related products and services to the EU-wide gross national product is about 5 %. In contradiction to this great value of copyright-related products and services the EU institutions started very late to scrutinise the different issues which might have to be solved in this context. Especially the issues, which are due to different levels of protection of copyrights in different Member States, started being solved by the adoption of harmonising directives. The first directive was adopted on 14 May 1991. This dissertation intends to scrutinise the commencement and the continuity of the harmonisation process in the area of copyrights in the EU. This scrutiny shall be embedded in the context of the development of the European Union as a such and the functioning of its institutions and the harmonisation of laws in the EU in general. A sound overview about these different areas of the European Union and the process of harmonisation concerning the harmonisation of national copyright laws shall be given.

Identiferoai:union.ndltd.org:netd.ac.za/oai:union.ndltd.org:uct/oai:localhost:11427/35321
Date12 November 2021
CreatorsBreuer, Stefan
ContributorsDevine, Derry
PublisherFaculty of Law, Intellectual Property Research Unit
Source SetsSouth African National ETD Portal
LanguageEnglish
Detected LanguageEnglish
TypeMaster Thesis, Masters, LLM
Formatapplication/pdf

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