Proposal to protect copyright law online

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Danette Breitenbach

The European Publishers Council (EPC) published its proposed measures to protect intellectual property rights and combat counterfeiting and piracy on Monday, 14 September 2009. It has been vocal in the copyright debate calling not for a change in copyright law, but rather for regulatory support for technical solutions to copyright compliance.

The EPC Commissioner, Charlie McCreevy, is reported as saying that the EU is home to some of most successful businesses in the world who consider intellectual property rights to be amongst their most precious commercial possessions.

One such solution is ACAP (Automated Content Access Protocol), a publisher initiative to create a new global tool for all rights holders to communicate their specific copyright terms and conditions online as they already do in the offline environment.

“ACAP is the perfect 21st century solution that the Commission could promote as best practice,” states ACAP Project Director Mark Bide. “It is a simple, machine-readable language that enables users to communicate their online copyright unambiguously in the way that the Internet works. We believe 300 years of copyright law is responsible for the content we see today. Now we need to ensure investment in content creation will continue to the mutual benefit of creators and users.”

The full Commission statement is available on http://ec.europa.eu/internal_market/iprenforcement/index_en.htm