6th Annual Conference of the European Copyright Society

On 27 May 2022, Prof. Derclaye, president of the European copyright society and the UNCLC, were delighted to host the 6th annual conference of the European Copyright Society.

The conference’s theme was “The Constitutional Turn in Copyright Law – From human rights, to competition aspects and fairness concerns”. In recent years, the CJEU and national courts have increasingly referred to human rights to justify copyright but also to balance it with other human rights. Post-Brexit, the UK still has retained much of EU law, including copyright law, and still follows CJUE precedents in the field of copyright until now. Likewise, EEA countries and associated countries also have to keep abreast of EU law developments. Therefore the keynote and the following session were essentially devoted to these countries and how human rights and the case law of the CJEU and ECtHR affects them.

The human rights discourse has pervaded many areas of copyright among others from the liability of intermediaries (such as art 17 directive 2019/790) to the exceptions and limitations to copyright. Beyond human rights, more general fairness concerns (such as how AI-generated works compete with authored-created works) and competition concerns (such as the use of contracts and TPMs to strengthen copyright) also pervade copyright discourse. The conference touched upon all these topics. That said, while human rights generally provide good checks and balances for copyright potential excesses, they may not be the only solution. The conference closed with discussions on this point.

The talks generated a lot of interesting questions from the audience which furthered interesting debates.

For the first time, the conference also included a session especially for students so that they could ask the members of the European Copyright Society questions about postgraduate studies, both masters and doctoral programmes, as well as career opportunities. Students told us that they found the session extremely helpful.

Attendees were complimentary both on content and organisation, and about our lovely campus too.