This book starts with an exercise proposing a theoretical reflection on the technological path
that over time has transformed the ways we produce consume and manage intellectual content
subject to copyright protection. This lays the groundwork for a further analysis of the main
legal aspects of the new European Directive its improvements its tendencies and its points of
controversy with special and more concrete attention to how it proposes to address the issues
of competition transparency and multi-territorial licensing. Digital technologies networks
and communication have boosted the production and distribution of intellectual content. These
activities are based on a renewable and infinite resource - creativity - which turns this
content into strategic artistic cultural social economic and informational assets. Managing
the rights and obligations that emerge in this system has never been an easy task managing
them collectively which is more often than not the case adds even more complexity. The
European Directive on collective management of copyright and related rights and
multi-territorial licensing of rights in musical works for online use in the internal market is
a policy initiative that seeks to establish an adequate legal framework for the collective
management of authors' rights in a digital environment recognizing this goal as crucial to
achieving a fully integrated Single Market. Part of the Digital Agenda for Europe it is an
effort to promote simplification and to enhance the efficiency of collective rights management
by tackling three of the main issues that are currently undermining the business model of
collecting societies: competition transparency and multi-territorial licensing. The book is
intended to support students academics and practitioners by enhancing their general and legal
grasp of these phenomena while also encouraging their collaboration with policymakers and
other interested parties in the ongoing task of transposing the Directive into concrete
national legislation.
