The digital world offers many opportunities for creators and innovators all around the world.
The intellectual property right that plays a major role in the digital world is copyright. Copyright protects the rights of authors, artists, architects, programmers, advertisers or any other owner of ideas expressed through creation.
As the world is being more connected than ever, challenges arise from the intellectual property point of view. Copyright infringement is, as the Minister for Intellectual Property of the United Kingdom said, a running sore for creative industries for far too long. In the digital world, this has taken even larger proportions. A study supported by the UK Intellectual Property Office shows that 15%, (equating to approximately 6.7 million) of UK internet users aged 12+ consumed at least one item of online content illegally over the three-month period March-May 2016. Music was by far the most-consumed content type, both digitally (355 million tracks) and physically (88 million tracks) over the three-month period. Further, according to the study, it is estimated that 78 million music tracks were accessed illegally online in the analyzed period.
Even though a more recent study released on the 5th July 2016 shows a fall in infringement due to the fact that people turned to streaming services, online infringement continues to have a major impact on the creative industries.
At the community level, new regulations are proposed to be implemented in the European Union by the end of 2016 as a part of a special project for ‘a more modern, more European copyright framework’. This project, Digital Single Market, aims to make online content available in all of the European Union countries and adapt copyright rules to the new technologies.
As it is self evident the urge for the need of intellectual property protection, we are committed to support the hard work of creators and innovators as we offer our services so they benefit from both economic and moral rights of the result of their creativity.