Competition and Intellectual Property protection in the market for the provision of multi-territorial licensing of online rights in musical works. Lights and shadows of the new European Directive 2014/26/EU

The Directive of February 2014 regarding the collective management of copyrights and the multi-territorial licensing for online rights in musical works is part of a broader framework of initiatives that the European Commission has been carrying forward in the past years, acting both as competition guarantor and as EU legislator, to the purpose of facilitating the emergence of a European single market for the exploitation of musical works in digital format. This study will analyze the new framework put forward by the new Directive 2014/26/EU with regard to the management of online rights in musical works by collective management organizations (CMOs) to see whether the EU legislators have succeeded in introducing a set of rules capable of fostering the emergence of a competitive EU-wide market for the provision of multi-territorial licenses. As it will be shown, not only several provisions contained in the new Directive offer reasons for concerns, as regards the protection of both competition and intellectual property rights in the new market for multi-territorial licenses, but recent judgements by both the General Court and the Court of Justice of the European Union (the Cisac and the OSA judgement respectively) seem to go against the spirit of the Directive.