Towards a More Socially Oriented EU Copyright Law. A Soft Paradigm Shift after Lisbon?

Social and cultural rights and policies are often intertwined in their positive and negative relationships with copyright. This chapter provides an overview of the Court of Justice of the EU's (CJEU) application of EU primary law provisions in the field of copyright, with the aim to understand whether and with which impact non-market considerations have found their way in the Court's decisions. It also provides a diachronic overview of soft law and secondary legislation that have intervened on national copyright laws respectively from 1991 to the advent of the Lisbon Treaty, and from the Lisbon Treaty, focusing on the interplay between market and non-market rationales. The chapter explores the same assessment on the CJEU's case law, searching for references to social and cultural rights and policies, and evaluating their impact on copyright rules. The overall aim is to verify whether the 'social market economy' principle has caused any paradigm shift in the approach to the harmonization of EU copyright law