Last Friday I attended the very interesting Creators’ Conference (well done on organising that, ECSA).  There were lots of very important points raised and I’m looking forward to ECSA posting those on the event’s website soon (Emmanuel Legrand’s blog already has a few).  In the meantime I thought I’d pick up on a few very relevant comments.

Yesterday I attended “Culture, An Added Value For Europe”, an event (excellently) organized by the European Coalitions for Cultural Diversity in collaboration with the European Platform on the Potential of Cultural and Creative Industries and moderated by Carole Tongue, former MEP.

On 24th January, I attended the 2nd IP Forum organised by French MEP Marielle Gallo on the online distribution of audiovisual and music works.  Neelie Kroes, vice-President of the European Commission and a panel of 5 experts completed the list of speakers.

Following up on a joint communiqué we recently signed with a number of other rightsholders (see here), I thought I’d personally welcome Antonio Vitorino as the new mediator for private copying remuneration.

“Audiovisual Authors Online – Seizing the Digital Revolution”, has come and gone and now that we’ve tied up (almost all) the loose ends that go with organising such an event, I thought I would share a few of my thoughts on how it all went here.

The second part of “Audiovisual Authors Online – Seizing the Digital Revolution”, the conference that SAA is organising this week, is all about how we can resolve one of the eternal frustrations of any author – making sure that his or her works are out there and accessible to the public (legally of course).

So, as Commissioner Kroes said, authors should be at the heart of copyright.  She used the word ‘should’.  Does that mean that they are not? Looking at this slightly differently, why not look at the role of authors within the value chain of their industry?  There will be an introductory session as part of Audiovisual Authors Online – Seizing the Digital Revolution, the conference we are organising next week, which will try to nail down exactly that.

Today I was going to publish a blog about the introductory section of our panel –authors in the audiovisual value chain. It seems however that Neelie Kroes, the European Commissioner for the Digital Agenda, beat me to it.

The SAA launched a year and a half ago (it seems like yesterday!).  Our first major piece of work was to produce the White Paper on Audiovisual Authors' Rights and Remuneration in Europe, which we published in February 2011 (you can read it here). 

The history of European copyright means that in today’s digital globalised world, things aren’t as simple as some would perhaps prefer.

The adoption of the Gallo report on the enforcement of intellectual property rights in the internal market by the European Parliament on 22 September is a great victory for European authors.