Film Copyright in the European Union (review)

When Canadian pop songstress Avril Lavigne angrily laments, "Why'd you have to go and make things so complicated?" ¹ one can safely assume she is referring to the frustrating vicissitudes of romantic relationships. But moving image archivists can be forgiven for sighing with a knowing tone and suspecting the lyric also secretly rebukes those responsible for the modern-day labyrinth of copyright law.

American archivists have seen an exacerbation of copyright intricacy through international agreements, nondefinitive court rulings, and frequent legislative changes to copyright, most recently the 1998 extension of copyright term (named by one congressional wag as the "Sonny Bono I-got-twenty-more-years-babe Copyright Term Extension Act of 1998"). ² The never-never land nature of intellectual property law was somewhat ironically summed up in a recent San Francisco court case pitting a British hospital for sick children against a Canadian children's book author over characters found in the classic work Peter Pan. ³

The complexities of these laws can bedevil even the best and the brightest from any nation. Copyright lawyer Eric Schwartz recalls a story while at the U.S. Copyright Office: Schwartz was asked to negotiate a bilateral agreement with a former Soviet satellite country (Mongolia) to improve copyright protections by requiring adoption of a modern national copyright law as part of democratic reforms to guarantee a free press and author's rights and to protect foreign works from piracy. However, once bogged down in the details of copyright law's workings, the American representatives, after some time of negotiations, gave the other country's experts a proposed draft agreement to adopt a Western-style copyright law (like the U.S. or European laws, with some variations). After some brief negotiations, the foreign experts talked vigorously among themselves and a few minutes later said, "We accept." "What do you accept?" replied the American officials. In effect, they had agreed to the idea of adopting the copyright law draft as is. ⁴

Development of the European Union (EU) presents daunting challenges in political, socioeconomic, and legal integration. In a recent address ("The Preparation of the European Constitution") at the Library of Congress, Valéry Giscard d'Estaing, former president of France, likened the effort to America's 1787 Constitutional Convention but considers Europe's task even more difficult: "In some ways, our task is trickier, because we are a Europe of many nations with strikingly disparate dimensions and living standards." ⁵ Given fifteen member nations with individual copyright laws and legal precedents, copyright in the EU approximates a quagmire. To wrest some order out of this chaos, the European Union is not seeking to create a single copyright law for the whole European community; rather, since 1992 the EU has issued a set of directives seeking to "approximate" copyright laws in the fifteen member nations.

Any effort to take an in-depth look at EU copyright law is a formidable task, and immediately out-of-date to some degree, given continuing court cases, legislative enactments, the pressing need to adapt to digital and other new technologies of distribution and exhibition, international negotiations, and pressures for change from powerful economic interests, not to mention the upcoming expansion of the EU from fifteen to twenty-five members. ⁶ But Pascal Kamina, assistant professor at the University of Poitiers, in his Film Copyright in the European Union, has done an outstanding job in providing a highly readable overview of European copyright and devised excellent navigation tools to move the reader through the hundreds of legal issues and fifteen nations involved. That said, this book, unquestionably with many admirable qualities, most definitely should not be considered as a literary companion for travel through the French countryside: it features a 13-page, 360-item table of contents, over 400 pages of text, and approximately 1,864 footnotes.

Kamina's ongoing key theme is focused on the main features found in the British and French copyright regimes...