Neighbouring rights for publishers: are national and (possible) EU initiatives lawful?
... or, in alternative, to introduce an EU-wide neighbouring right for publishers Over the past few years debate has ensued at the level of EU Member States and the EU alike on how to address declining revenues in the press publishing sector. Although this is not a new phenomenon (in some European countries newspaper circulation has been in decline since the 1950s, in parallel with the advent of television), since 2000 newspaper advertising sales in Europe have fallen across the board . This data is in line with what has also occurred in the US where, according to the Pew Research Center , from 2013 to 2014 newspapers’ annual overall revenues have fallen from approximately $46m to approximately $20m. Some have indicated the internet, notably news aggregation services (ie aggregators of syndicated web content in one location, an example being Google News), as primarily responsible for this phenomenon. According to two studies by the Iowa Un...