EU: ‘Current European copyright laws are outdated’

Neelie Kroes, the vice-president of the European Commission responsible for the Digital Agenda gave a speech today at  the Intellectual Property and Innovation Summit in Brussels. In her speech she called for a reform of the current European copyright legislation. According to Kroes, the current European copyright laws make that consumers are missing out easy and legal access to content they like and the creative sector misses out on new developments, discoveries and opportunities.

At the moment copyright holders have to deal with 27 different sets of rules when they want to bring out their works pan-European, it even took the BBC years of paperwork to market a TV program across Europe.  According to Kroes this means that Europe is missing a lot of opportunities as for content creators it’s easier to market their content in the United States, where they can reach hundreds of millions of consumers while dealing with a single authority, instead of dealing with 27 authorities in Europe.

Kroes seems to be pleading for a unified European copyright law which could be based on an European directive created in 2001 and she calls for a discussion on the subject. She also mentioned before that she thinks the millions currently spend on the protection of copyrights don’t prevent piracy and make that a lot of consumers are currently fed up with copyright laws. Here at Myce, knowing how the digital world has evolved the last two decades, we think  it’s about time the copyright laws change.