Law Matters | IN Content Law

Cross-border acquisitions of works protected by copyright (such as books, music and films) may not be directly affected by the laws of both the country from which the work is acquired and the country into which the work is brought. After all, one of the fundamental principles of contract law is that parties are free to determine the terms of the agreements into which they enter, and that freedom extends to allowing the parties to a contract to choose which law would govern them. Nonetheless, negotiations relating to the cross-border acquisitions of copyrighted works cannot be undertaken in a manner which completely dissociates itself from the provisions of the laws in the relevant countries. Among the factors which would have to be considered are substantive differences in copyright law, tax implications, and the so-called procedural differences between the laws of the two countries. Although taxation provisions may, at first glance, appear to be unrelated to th...

In recent times, there have been a number of attempts to move away from traditional business models which result in creators (often) being underpaid and publisher-distributors being (arguably) overpaid. In many cases, the creators of copyrighted works have begin to play a proactive role in the commercialisation of their works after they have been created. For example, as Kaitlin Mara pointed out in “ Copyright Law’s ‘Byzantine Maze’ Stalling New Business Models ”, a number of music bands have been experimenting with alternative methods of exploiting the copyright in their music: Radiohead released the album “In Rainbows” online and, for the first few weeks after its release, users could pay whatever they wanted to pay, if at all they did. Nine Inch Nails released two albums under a Creative Commons licence. McFly launched a new website with a limited number of potential members (10,000 persons). It charged £40 to become a member; on the first morning itself, they had 55,000 member...