D2.1 Interim report on EU and national sources and private practices on legitimate uses and flexibilities

The end-users’ perspective is often an unspoken side of the European copyright regulatory framework. In light of the objectives pursued by reCreating Europe, and its overarching aim to promote a modern, creative, culturally diverse, accessible Europe, Work Package (WP) 2 – End users and access to culture takes up the challenge of unveiling the role of end-users’ rights, interests, expectations, and behaviors vis-à-vis copyright rules.
To this end, Task 2.1 - Comparative and EU cross-national mapping of regulatory and private ordering sources purports to set the ground for high-profile multidisciplinary research by way of an encompassing mapping of relevant public and private sources of law related to copyright flexibilities. The scope of the legal mapping encompasses the harmonized European Union (EU) copyright legal framework, the national copyright systems of all 27 EU Member States, and a selection of contractual regulations from over 20 digital platforms. Its unprecedently wide coverage and sound methodological approach make the database resulting from the research efforts of WP2 - Task 2.1 a unique repository on copyright flexibilities in Europe and beyond.
In its first year of operation, the researchers’ teams involved in this Task have virtually completed the collection of the relevant data, and successfully consolidated the structure for their systematic analysis. A preliminary version of the threefold dataset addressing, respectively, EU legal sources, national legal sources, and private ordering mechanisms, is provided as Annexes 1, 2, and 3 to this document.
The interim report here presented offers a detailed overview of the pursued objectives, specific research questions, consolidated structure and methodology, and preliminary findings of the research conducted to date. The study focuses on two guiding concepts, i.e., the notion of “copyright flexibilities” within the copyright legislative framework, and the “user-friendliness” of market-based private ordering practices related to the consumption of digital content. The conceptualization of both these notions has been elected as the beacon of the ongoing quantitative, qualitative, and comparative analysis of the data collected, as well as the leading principles for the purpose of dissemination and public discussion of the research findings.