Home | Databases | WorldLII | Search | Feedback Edited Legal Collections Data

Westkamp, Guido --- "Author’s Rights and Internet Regulation: The End of the Public Domain or Constitutional Re-Conceptualization?" [2006] ELECD 334; in Pugatch, Perez Meir (ed), "The Intellectual Property Debate" (Edward Elgar Publishing, 2006)

Book Title: The Intellectual Property Debate

Editor(s): Pugatch, Perez Meir

Publisher: Edward Elgar Publishing

ISBN (hard cover): 9781845420383

Section: Chapter 14

Section Title: Author’s Rights and Internet Regulation: The End of the Public Domain or Constitutional Re-Conceptualization?

Author(s): Westkamp, Guido

Number of pages: 23

Extract:

14. Author's rights and internet
regulation: the end of the public
domain or constitutional
re-conceptualization?
Guido Westkamp

Copyright has changed dramatically. The 1996 WIPO Treaties,1 the Digital
Millennium Copyright Act and the European Directive Copyright and
Related Rights in the Information Society,2 in an attempt to rejuvenate
traditional copyright to make it viable for the information society, have add-
itionally altered the traditional structure copyright law. Today's prominent
catchphrases indicate that the former `bundle of exclusive rights' enjoyed by
an author now encompasses the use of a work and also entails the author's
exclusive right to authorize or prohibit access to it. Whereas the notion of
a use right may be inferred from changes and amendments implemented in
relation to existing economic rights, the idea of an access right is closely
connected with the legal protection afforded to technological measures
employed by the right holder. These measures may restrict access to certain
parts of a work or make access to the work subject to the right-holder's
consent. It is now prohibited to circumvent such means in order to gain
unauthorized access. These safeguards are flanked by amendments in the
ambit of economic rights. Global and European instruments have intro-
duced not only a novel right of public communication, which includes (but
is apparently not restricted to) making the work available to the public by
providing access at a time and place chosen by the user, but in addition have
implemented, at least ...