In case of digital goods such like music, intellectual property rights are typically not exerted by the creators (artists) but by intermediaries. Their profits, and therefore also the income of the artists, are endangered by copyright infringements (piracy). It is well known from static welfare...

The Directive on Copyright in the Digital Single Market Directive ((EU) 2019/790) has been a subject of heated and highly polarised debate, and an object of intense lobbying from the outset. It grasped the attention of a multitude of stakeholders, including tech companies, publishers, platforms,...

Moderne Technologien machen es den Nutzern möglich, sehr viel mehr urheberrechtlich geschützte Güter zu kopieren und weiterzugeben, als dies noch vor 50 Jahren der Fall war. Das Urheberrecht kann die Rechteinhaber derzeit nicht effektiv schützen. Es müsste gründlich reformiert werden, um...

Despite the rapidly growing volume and economic importance of data in the digital economy, the legal framework for data ownership, access and trade remains incompletely defined in the EU and elsewhere. De facto data ownership dominates and often leads to fragmentation or anti-commons problems in...

This study measures the extent of cross-border geo-blocking and the impact on product availability and pricing for three non-audio-visual digital media products (music, e-books and games) in the EU Digital Single Market. We find that cross-border access to online media stores is generally...

Intellectual property rights are often justified by utilitarian theory. However, recent scholarship suggests that creativity thrives in some industries in the absence of intellectual property protection. These industries might be called IP's negative spaces. One such industry that has received...

In copyright, we are guided by a simple intuition: More revenue leads to more original works. But the relationship between revenue and creative output is not so simple. Broadening copyright in order to increase the revenue associated with any given work may ensure the expected profitability, and...

The rights of users of copyrighted materials are growing in significance. This is the result of fundamental changes in the creative ecosystem that pull in opposite directions: on the one hand, the flourishing of user-generated content places individual users at the forefront of creative...

As a new and global communications medium, the Internet has enabled the quick and effective dissemination of digitized content. For popular and technological reasons, the music industry has become the first major content industry to face the legal issues surrounding the rapid and widespread...

With the Dutch referral of the Tom Kabinet case (C-263/18) in July 2017, the CJEU will soon have its final say on the admissibility of digital exhaustion under Art. 4(2) InfoSoc. Until now, years of national decisions and CJEU’s obiter dicta have provided a patchwork of inconsistent answers,...