Europe wide licences for television programmes

In 1981 in Coditel SA v Cine Vog Films the owner of seven-year exclusive distribution rights in Belgium of a film was able to restrain relaying by cable in Belgium of a German television broadcast of the film. The European Court of Justice took the view that as broadcasting was organised largely on the basis of statutory broadcasting monopolies it was impracticable to grant copyright licences other than on a geographical basis. Does anyone have any views on whether it would be decided the same way today? In the last 16 years the situation has changed markedly and we now do have pan-European broadcasting. Ted Turner broadcasts unencrypted from Intelsat, Eutelsat and Astra satellites, as does Eurosport. French and Italian terrestrial channels are receivable by satellite unencrypted in other member States and so are German satellite channels as well as some channels from Spain and Greece.

        In the August Personal Computer World Barry Fox comments on the UK Channel 5 transmission on Astra. It soft scrambles in Videocrypt, so that it is necessary to have a Videocrypt decoder, but not a subscription smartcard to receive the transmissions. He says the reason for this is that Channel 5 only has copyright licences for the UK. Apparently the right owners or the collecting societies are objecting that Videocrypt decoders are on sale in the Irish Republic which is not covered by the licences. Ought the European Commission to be asking the ECJ to reconsider whether the granting of licences restricted to a single member State offends against Article 59 of the Treaty of Rome?

        If the problem really is the geographical extent of the copyright licence I can't see how Videocrypt helps. There is probably copyright in the sound track and the works used in it. Videocrypt does not scramble the sound track.

                                 Richard Cole <richardcole[_at_]cix.co.uk>
                                 New Court
                                 Temple
                                 London EC4Y 9BE
                                 England