Dataset of EU and national regulatory responses and private ordering trends on barriers to access to culture available to consortium (MS10)

This Milestone report illustrates, with regard to Task 2.1.1, the data collection and analysis methods, the main findings, and the main intellectual outputs of this specific task, particularly the reCreating Europe public database on copyright flexibilities (hereinafter ‘the Database’). Background, methodologies and findings of Task 2.1.2 are channeled into the paper P.Mezei, I.Harkai, End-User Flexibilities in Digital Copyright Law – An Empirical Analysis of End-user License Agreements, publicly available here. By conducting a comparative (meso-level, functional, contextual and common core comparison) and empirical research (collecting and analyzing the private ordering mechanisms of selected services providers), the authors compared 17 different services in the field of streaming with/without host function, online marketplaces and social media platforms. Eight variables (e.g., the extent of the access right, provision on and allowance of UGC, termination/modification of user account/subscription) were identified and used for the sake of comparison of the user flexibility of the studied platforms.

As the key findings indicate, users are granted a limited range of flexibilities with respect to the use of digital contents. Allowance of UGC is a strong contributing factor to the higher flexibility index, meanwhile platforms with only streaming function are less user friendly.