A Study On Copyright Collective Management In The European Union

Copyright collective management(CCM) is undertaken by collective management organisations(CMO) who are authorized by rightholders, includes practices like licensing the works, collecting and distributing revenue, etc. While CCM is established in most European countries, European Union(EU) adopts and develops the CCM system in its legislation integration progress. The dissertation has adopts historical, comparative and empirical methods to analyse EU’s CCM in tradition and in reformation. By doing so, the dissertation aims at drawing a conclusion on CCM’s features and existing problems, going further research, and providing theory support for China’s CCM’s improvement. The preface introduces CCM’s fundamental theory, including relative conceptions, historic evolution and features. The text analyses EU’s CCM in three sections.The first section introduces EU’s law resources of CCM first, then deepens the analysis on the law resources basis, discusses CCM’s traditional mode by means of operation mechanism, disputes settlement mechanism and supervision mechanism, points out traditional mode’s features and existing problems. The end of this section draws a concentrated conclusion, that traditional mode is featured as monopoly mode and a legal framework which is mainly based on competition law,it also makes it clear though traditional mode has functioned well in the past,some problems that hinders CCM’s development do exist and needs to be solved;The second section firstly depicts the background of EU’s reformation, points out that it is necessary and feasible to start a reformation, by making an analysis about Internet’s challenges and chances. Following is a text interpretation of reformation plans, this will pave the analysis of reformation’s progress, achievements and influences on stakeholders in the following section. A series of EU’s legislation based on its plans is discussed at the end of the section; the third section is a detailed analysis about the reformation’s latest achievement, its influences, and useful enlightenment. The latest achievement includes reasons to choose a general legislation and the legislation’s content, and the unsolved problems. Influences is mainly about those to stakeholders, including CMOs, rightholders, users. At last, the dissertation gives some suggestions on how to improve China CCM system, the suggestions are based on a combined analysis of China CCM’s imperfections and EU’s experiences’ enlightenment.