Study Of The Institution Of Law To Protect EU Audio-visual Industry

In the early1980s, the EU’s audiovisual industry has been enjoying an unprecedented development, and the market of the EU’s audiovisual industry has become one of the largest audio-visual markets in the world. However this rapid development did not bring much joy to the European Union because of the fact that the member states of EU have a low production capacity in audio-visual, so they cannot meet the large demand of audio-visual products in audio-visual market. The imbalance of supply and demand in the EU leads to import a large number of audio-visual products from abroad. At the same time, the United States is the strongest country of audiovisual industry in the world. In1992, the number of audio-visual products which US exports to the EU have reached3.6billion, while the number that EU exports to the U.S. is290million. The large imbalance between import and export in the European Union is seen as a program invasion of the U.S. to Europe. In order to alleviate the imbalance between imports and exports, protect the healthy development of the local market and safeguard the diversity of culture in European, the EU decided to adopt a series of policy measures to protect the development of the audiovisual industry. First, in order to fundamentally solve this trade deficit, they must vigorously develop the audiovisual industry and improve the production capacity of the EU audiovisual industry, which requires the policy of the subsidies, so EU has drawn up three "the Media Program", and these three programs take the purpose to encourage and develop the EU’s audiovisual industry. Since founded in1991, these programs have invested1.78billion euros to the EU audiovisual industry. Second, the EU will limit the import of audio-visual products. They set the highest proportion of imports of the "non-European works" and set specifically the proportion of the imports of U.S. audio-visual products. In addition, some countries set up a maximum proportion of imports of the audio-visual products for the United States, and provide that, when playing American movies, part of the movie ticket fares will be used to finance the country’s film production. To implement and enforce these policies and measures, the EU issued a paper which is called "The television without frontiers". In this paper, EU clearly put forward to establish a unified audiovisual industry market in European. This paper clearly defined to protect the EU audiovisual industry by two fundamental principles; the first is to break the concept of territoriality in the EU member states, making the European television programs a free movement within the unified market in Europe. Second, European domestic TV channels should be reserved more than half of playback time for local television programs in Europe with possible conditions. Furthermore, the protection of the EU audiovisual industry should be on the international level, in order to seek international cooperation.In order to safeguard the efficient implementation of these three protective measures, the EU must establish a sound legal system and determine the effective implementation. The legal basis of the EU audiovisual industry policy is "the EU Treaty" and "the public broadcasting system for members of the Amsterdam Treaty Protocol". The protection of the legal system of the EU audiovisual industry is built on the two treaties. At the same time, the improvement of the legal system must be in the foundation of "The Television without Frontiers", in order to encourage and coordinate the growth of the European TV market, and to stimulate the nation in low production capacity to develop audiovisual industry and to find a balance. On this basis, the EU should gradually improve the laws and regulations on the protection of the audiovisual industry, and the protection measures should be clearly defined, in order to achieve the target which is to establish a platform for the free communication of information and thought, promoting "European consciousness", and to provide a broad channel for the free dissemination of EU’s cultural diversity. Also, as long as to establish gradual a unified market of the EU audiovisual industry, to improve the overall competitiveness of the audiovisual industry to compete with the United States, they need to reserve the situation of monopoly by the U.S. audiovisual industry.