Abstract
Copyright has become a more central part of society today than ever before. We have new objective evidence of the economic contribution of the copyright industries: in the United States, the Department of Commerce’s (DOC) 2012 report on “Intellectual Property and the U.S. Economy” found that copyright-intensive industries contributed $641 billion, or 4.4%, to the U.S. GDP in 2010, and provided more than 5 million jobs. Last year’s comparable study for Europe from the Office for Harmonization of the Internal Market (OHIM) found that copyright- intensive industries contributed 3.2% of total employment. And copyright has become more pervasive in the daily life of the ordinary person, not only as a user of content in the online environment, but also as a creator of new material and as a transformer and effectively a publisher of material created by others. As a result, almost every copyright issue these days sparks press coverage as well as public attention and debate.