European copyright, competition and innovation policy in the creative sectors

Our main purpose is identifying the relations between copyright legislation and other European policies in the cultural and creative sectors such as competition and incentive to innovation. We argue that the European political debate about the copyright reform shows how copyright law can be used as a tool for regulating market competition, with the aim of rebalancing market power between the Internet giants and the traditional cultural industries. However, the excessive political focus on particular cases - such as the conflict between press publishers and Google News - left underestimated other important issues and ignored potential outcomes of new contradictory regulation, as in the case of text and data mining. We conclude that copyright legislation is a valid instrument to cope with the current market asymmetry, but it works only if supported by an explicit, clear and effective competition policy. To complete the picture, we argue that support to technological innovation and evolution of business models should be the third pillar of the strategy in the cultural and creative industries.