The European Court of Justice has decided the Uradex copyright case on June 1st.
The remarkable result of that case is that a collecting society can grant or deny permission for cable retransmission even without having received any transfer of copyright from the rightholders in question.
Uradex, the collecting society in question in this case, can represent authors without a mandate from them. They can grant or deny permissions without checking what the real copyright holders want, and possibly contrary to their will.
The reason is that Article 9 of the relevant Directive 93/83 wants to simplify the procedure for clearing rights. If every copyright holder concerned would need to be asked individually, clearing the rights for cable retransmission would become too burdensome. The Directive removes some of the authors' rights to ensure "smooth operation".
This model might be considered in other circumstances where one wants the ability to clear rights in a simpler way, for example when discussing orphaned works or Internet search machine caching.
Posted by Karl-Friedrich Lenz at June 9, 2006 03:02 PM