ReCreating Europe at EPIP 2021 

On 9 and 10 September 2021, several ReCreating Europe members participated in the 16th Annual Conference of the European Policy for Intellectual Property (EPIP) Association, dedicated to “IP and Future of Innovation” and hosted by the Centre of Humanities and Social Sciences of the Spanish National Research Council in Madrid.

The occasion was special, to say the least: for most of us, this was the first face-to-face conference since the outbreak of the pandemic. The prestigious venue of EPIP, which gathers more than 200 academics from across Europe every year, from different disciplines and backgrounds, made it incredibly meaningful for ReCreating Europe’s researchers to share the preliminary results of their work.

On September 9, the ReCreating Europe roundtable entitled ‘Centrifugal forces in EU copyright law’ took place. It was chaired by Martin Kretschmer, and participants included our project coordinator Caterina Sganga, WP3 members Ula Furgal and Thomas Margoni, WP3 leader Joost Poort, and WP6 leader João Pedro Quintais. Two illustrious respondents joined the roundtable, commenting on the research insights presented by the panelists: Brando Benifei, Member of the European Parliament, and Bence Kertész, from EU Commission DG CONNECT. See the full presentations on Zenodo.

The roundtable successfully managed to provide an overview of the main interim results of the project, highlighting gaps and dangers of today’s and tomorrow’s EU digital copyright scenario. ReCreating Europe’s researchers presented the innovative qualitative and quantitative research carried out in the past 20 months and the outcomes achieved by mapping and measuring the impact of the current multi-level legislative framework, with particular focus on copyright flexibilities, authors’ remuneration and bargaining power, copyright data ownership, transparency and AI technologies, and intermediaries and content moderation.

On September 10, another ReCreating Europe panel took place. This time the session was dedicated to the presentation of the results of the work conducted within WP2 on End-Users and Access to Culture. The panel featured three paper presentations: First, Giulia Rossello and Arianna Martinelli presented their ongoing empirical work under the title “Sci-Hub and Academics: Survey evidence from EU countries”, illustrating the survey they circulated across six European countries on academics’ perception of copyright law and the diffusion of academic digital piracy; Then, Giulia Priora and Caterina Sganga presented their upcoming paper “Betwitxt EU and national: the present and future of copyright flexibilities”, based on their legal mapping across all 27 Member States and related thorough comparative analysis of the legal understandings underlying EU copyright flexibilities; And finally, Peter Mezei and Istvan Harkai presented their published contribution entitled “End-user flexibilities in digital copyright law – An empirical analysis of end-user license agreements”, in which they explore the private ordering facet of copyright regulation and the way platforms’ end-users license agreements interact end-users’ freedoms and experiences. To see all the presentations from this session, they are available on Zenodo.

The EPIP conference turned out to be an incredibly fruitful moment of exchange and discussion of ReCreating Europe’s numerous preliminary results, and an important moment of assessment of the work done so far and our future plans. The cross-disciplinary research efforts and enthusiastic activities carried out since January 2020 from ReCreating Europe’s researchers met the genuine interest of academics, policymakers, and stakeholders in the audience – making the three-day-long conference not only an important moment of discussion but also an input for ReCreating Europe’s team for further work and collaborations within the scope of the project’s activities and objectives.

Stay tuned as further events will soon follow!