The Competence of the European Union in Copyright Lawmaking

This book inquires into the competence ofthe EU to legislate in the field of copyright, and uses content analysistechniques to demonstrate the existence of a normative gap in copyrightlawmaking. To address that gap, it proposes the creation of benchmarks oflegislative activity, reasoning that EU secondary legislation, such as directivesand regulations, should be based on higher sources of law. It investigates twosuch possible sources: the activity of the EU Court of Justice in thepre-legislative era and the EU treaties. From these sources, the authorestablishes concrete benchmarks of legislative activity, which she then testsby applying them to current EU copyright legislation. This provides examples ofgood and bad practices in copyright lawmaking and also shows how the benchmarkscould be implemented in copyright legislation. Finally, the author offers somerecommendations in this regard.