Collective Management of Copyrights and the EU Principle of Free Movement of Services after the OSA Judgment – In Favour of a More Balanced Approach

Abstract

On 20 February 2014, the Council of the European Union has adopted the new Directive on Collective Rights Management. In its Proposal for this Directive, the Commission argued that cross-border collective rights management services are liberalised pursuant to Article 16 of the Services Directive of 2006. Yet, only one week after the adoption of the new Directive, this view was rejected by the Court of Justice of the EU in the OSA judgment. This paper analyses the relationship between the principle of free movement of services and national sector-specific regulation of CMOs in more detail in order to explore to which extent the principle of free movement of services and the need for specific rules for collective management of copyrights could be better coordinated in the future.

Keywords: European law, copyright, collective rights management, Services Directive, free movement of services