Date: 3 March 2022
In the post-digital era, we access copyright protected content primarily over the Internet. This model poses various challenges to a system that was mainly designed in and for the analogue age. One of these challenges is related to a fair balance between the interests of rightsholders and the rest of the society. Copyright norms try to guarantee this balance by granting a high level of protection for the benefit of rightsholders and preserve some flexibility for the benefit of users through limitations and exceptions, and the principle of exhaustion. Content providers, with their private norms, especially end-user license agreements (EULAs) and terms of use/service, might effectively regulate and enforce that balance in their role as intermediaries in this ecosystem.
As part of the now well-established advance access provision, for the 5.1 issue, we bring you End-User Flexibilities in Digital Copyright Law – An Empirical Analysis of End-user License Agreements, by authors Péter Mezei and István Harkai, a comparative and empirical study on how private norms allow for or diminish the exercise of end-user flexibilities related to copyright protected subject matter.
The event was hosted by Dr Yin Harn Lee (University of Bristol) with Professor Eleonora Rosati (Stockholm University) and Professor Uma Suthersanen (Queen Mary University of London) on the panel.