EU copyright law between property and fundamental rights: A proposal to connect the dots

Abstract

Although scholars and stakeholders have long analyzed and tried to limit the clashes between copyright and fundamental rights caused by the recent developments of EU copyright law, none of their proposed solutions has been proven successful. This chapter is based on the assumption that the cause of this impasse lies in the systematic chaos generated by the incompatibility of EU and national copyright models. Since its onset, EU copyright law has substantially departed from Member States' common traditions, while Article 17.2 of the European Charter of Fundamental Rights (ECFR) completed the paradigm shift by formalizing the definition of copyright in proprietary terms. Due to the vagueness of CJEU's "fair balance" test and the different approaches of the ECFR and national constitutions to the functions, limits, and hierarchical rank of property rights, this classification has broadened the divide between EU and national case laws and caused several interpretive short circuits before national courts. The chapter argues that the only way out from the stalemate is a systematic reordering of this otherwise fragmented multilevel framework. To this end, it starts with a description of the main symptoms of the EU paradigm shift (§ 2) and compares the effects of copyright propertization before the CJEU and in selected Member States (§ 3). Then it proposes an integrated interpretation of CJEU’s precedents in light of the common constitutional traditions (§ 4) and concludes by providing examples of how the new interpretative framework may help to restore the lost balance on more solid and stable systematic bases (§ 5).