Copyright issues related to reproduction rights arising from streaming

Abstract

With the rapid development of streaming media technology, more and more people have begun to watch films on streaming websites. However, it has been noted that some of them are streaming unauthorized content, which has posed a major challenge to the entertainment sector's traditional business model. Against this background, legal issues arising from the streaming of media online is an area of huge current interest, one issue being the exact liability of providers and users of streaming services and whether they are infringing on the reproduction right of the copyright holders. Since the liability of platforms has been extensively discussed in the academic literature, in this article we mainly focus on the liability of users who stream unauthorized works. To this end, the article analyses the reproduction act of streaming platform users under the UK and European Union approaches and examines Article 5(1) of the Information Society Directive in the context of streaming. In addition, we explore the liability of users who stream unauthorized content via virtual private network services.