The Sovereign Title (3)

INTRODUCTION 3

At the time when the Civil Code was drafted, the economy was dominated by the primary sector, with mainly agricultural activities. The Code therefore aims to protect real estate, the main source of capital.

We have now entered the era of the knowledge economy; over 80% of the wealth is created by the service sector. The proper exploitation of nature, competitiveness, income and jobs depend on advances in knowledge from R & D. Capital takes on an intangible form. Software has assumed essential importance in almost all areas.

With digital technology, creation is no longer reserved for a small elite of artists, scientists and large companies. While UNESCO counts only 7 million researchers in the world, each of the billions of Internet users is likely to be informed, to train, to create, to publish, to cooperate and to innovate.

To legislate is to follow the evolution of society and guess its requirements. Today, creative work has taken on a dominant importance over industrial repetitive work. Portalis reminds us that the legislator, “must not lose sight of the fact that laws are made for men”. In 2021, as was the case in 1800, “the worst innovation would be not to innovate.”

Intellectual property reform is underway in Europe to integrate these developments in practice and open up the right to ownership of creative capital to everyone. Jean Monnet asserted that each crisis can be an opportunity for new advances. The terrible crisis that the European economy is going through in 2020–21 offers an opportunity for the effective implementation of this reform. Change must indeed allow everyone to effectively exercise their creative talents to help build a better world.

The European Union (EU) has launched an Intelligent Specialization Strategy (S3) program with the aim of renewing the economy, mainly through startups and innovation. This program provides each region a lever that allows it to initiate creative R & D investment of each of its specialties. The President of the European Commission has forecast that 1,000 billion euros will be allocated to financing the climate transition and the recovery between 2020 and 2030.

With a budget of 67 billion euros, 120 “S3 projects” have already emerged in the period 2018–2020. The achievements planned at the end of this first period are:

• the launch of 15,000 new products on the market,

• the foundation of 140,000 startups

• and the creation of 350,000 jobs.

The potential for development of knowledge is unlimited. For its funding to be properly insured, it is important to ensure better returns on investment in R & D. This is why the EU strives to improve the rights of intellectual property. Thus, effective relays will be ensured because startups will be able to present attractive investments to private savings, with long amortization periods and extensive geographic protections. Thanks to the new intellectual property, the regions will also be able to obtain mortgages on the creations resulting from R&D financed with the help of public funds, in order to preserve the interests of their territory — in particular against offshoring.

According to Article 17 of Copyright Directive 2019/790, protected content may no longer be uploaded to the Internet without the permission of the rights holder. In application of the international covenants associated with the Universal Declaration of the Rights of the Human Being, this directive protects all author’s work, whether scientific, literary or artistic. Member states have until June 7, 2021 to implement it. After this date, any violation may be subject to heavy penalties and damages sanctioning the infringement.

Copyright Directive 2019/790 assigns stakeholders the task of developing best practices to ensure legal certainty for all players in the digital market. They need to find the best practices to effectively answer two simple questions:

1. Is the work original?

2. Has the genuine rights holder granted a license to place it on the market?

One of the most appropriate tools for doing this is the adoption of a standard collecting all the best practices.

This Directive is currently only applicable to YouTube-type uploaders. But international treaties make it possible to sanction all infringements of protected content. Sooner or later, the sale of counterfeits on the Internet will have to stop. The universal standard of IP will cover all sales or leasing transactions of goods and services, whatever the form.

For this legal certainty to extend to international trade, it is important that the standard offers, as required by the directive, simple, rapid and uniform means for settling disputes. In Portalis’ thinking, truth and scientific evidence must outweigh all other legal considerations.

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Table of Contents

The Sovereign Title

• Introduction 1
  Introduction 2
  Introduction 3
  Introduction 4
  Introduction 5
  The intellectual property revolution : Chapter 1

(Cf) Creafree 2021