Prof. Bernt Hugenholtz speaking at podium
Prof. Bernt Hugenholtz speaking at podium

Prof. Bernt Hugenholtz Delivers the 2nd Annual Peter Jaszi Distinguished Lecture: Flexing Authors’ Rights

November 7, 2013 | Room 603 | 6:15pm
American University Washington College of Law

 

Professor Bernt Hugenholtz: Flexing Authors’ Rights (Slides)

The global future of cultural institutions, information industries, and individual creative work hinges, in part, on present decisions about the scope and character of copyright exceptions and limitations.Almost everyone agrees that modern copyright law needs to be flexible in order to accommodate rapid technological change and evolving media uses. In the United States fair use is the flexible instrument of choice. Author’s rights systems in Europe are generally deemed to be less flexible and less tolerant to open-ended limitations and exceptions. But are they really?

This lecture makes the case that (1) author’s rights systems can be made as flexible as common law copyright systems, and (2) that the existing EU legal framework does not preclude the development of flexible norms at the national level.

Bio: Professor Bernt Hugenholtz

Bernt Hugenholtz is Professor of law and Director of the Institute for Information Law (IViR) at the University of Amsterdam. He is also a professor at the University of Bergen (Norway), and regularly teaches at the Munich Intellectual Property Law Center (Munich), Monash University (Melbourne) and Charles University (Prague).

He is the co-author, with Prof. Paul Goldstein (Stanford University), of International Copyright. Principles, Law, and Practice (Oxford University Press, 3nd ed. 2012), and has written extensively on a range of copyright-related issues. He has acted as an advisor to the World Intellectual Property Organization, the European Commission, the European Parliament and the Netherlands Ministry of Justice.

Prof. Hugenholtz is widely regarded as the foremost expert on copyright in the EU.  He was a member of the Drafting Committee of the Wittem Project, a collaboration between copyright scholars across Europe that produced the ground-breaking model “European Copyright Code” in 2010. With Ian Hargreaves, he authored the 2013 Lisbon Council policy brief on “Copyright Reform for Growth and Jobs:  Modernising the European Copyright Framework.”

About the Peter Jaszi Lecture Distinguished Lecture on Intellectual Property

PIJIP’s Distinguished Lecture on Intellectual Property Law is named in recognition of the extraordinary contributions of Professor Peter Jaszi to the study of intellectual property at WCL and in the world at large, and in particular for his lasting contributions to the elevation of the public interest In intellectual property discourse. PIJIP accepts contributions to support the Peter Jaszi Distinguished Lecture.