Intellectual property laws should be the same in every EU country, the European Copyright Society (ECS) said this week.
The influential think tank has written to the European Commission’s Günther Oettinger to make the case for the same legislation to be rolled out across all 28 member states.
The ECS believes that this would be a more effective strategy than just attempting to further harmonise the copyright regime.
In the letter to Mr Oettinger, who is the EU’s digital economy chief, the ECS argued that the various, often conflicting rules, of individual countries stood in the way of “a genuinely unified legal framework.”
“While copyright unification may be considered undesirable, or perhaps too drastic, by certain stakeholders and national legislatures, this is in our opinion the only way a fully functioning digital single market for copyright-based goods and services can ultimately be achieved,” the organisation wrote.
“It is in fact the logical next step for the EU legislature to take in this field.”
The basics of European copyright law are set down in 2001’s Information Society Directive, although member states were given a degree of flexibility over how they implemented the legislation, which means that there are still significant differences in how countries apply the law.
Mr Oettinger, whose political career began in his native Germany, is broadly sympathetic to the principle of introducing one set of copyright laws across the trading bloc.
But it’s thought it could be difficult to get some countries to agree to a completely uniform approach; only last year a raft of new copyright exceptions were agreed by the UK government.
The ECS has acknowledged that a single set of laws could only be achieved in the medium or long term but said there was no reason that work could not start now.