Tomáš Dobřichovský – lawyer
CONCLUSIONS
First of all, I would like to thank all the speakers of “Raising Awareness in relation to copyright – Facing piracy” workshop for their well prepared and balanced presentations. At the same time there was focused and demanding audience. This combination ended in a fruitful and inspiring discussion full of remarkable ideas. Therefore, it was not easy for me to sum up the whole workshop just in a few words as I was told to do. However, I tried to do my best.
Hence, I would like to share with you main conclusion points:
- Copyright remains essential tool for the protection and support of creativity and culture.
- It seems to be clear that the piracy remains the big problem for the creative industry.
- Modern technologies and rapid technological development enable copyright infringement, let say „within a mouse click“.
- At the same time digital age brings the content providers large scale of opportunities to make content widely available through the new business models.
- Experience show that campaigns generally treating users downloading the content as criminals are in principle negatively perceived by public and do not solve the problem of piracy.
- On the other hand, positively oriented campaigns explaining users and consumers the importance of copyright protection and the all intellectual and financial investment needed for creation of new works still remain one of the key tool of consumers´ education.
- It is also very important to provide consumers not only with information what they can not do but rather with guidelines on where to find a content legally, easily, consumer-friendly – and in many cases almost for free.
- Only a good cooperation of all stakeholders – to start with the government and to continue with rightholders, content providers, intermediaries (as Internet Service Providers etc.) and, of course, of consumers´ organizations can help to fulfill this very difficult task to raise public awareness effectively and with the desired outcomes and at the same time to meet consumers´ needs.
I hope that the participants have found the workshop inspiring and useful. We have covered a lot of fields and we have had passionate and fruitful discussion on a lot of issues concerning our topic.
I think I can sum it up by saying that public awareness projects are indispensable in the effort to fight piracy. We have learned that these projects, if balanced and well prepared, work in practice and therefore they must play a crucial role in any copyright policy.
Last but not least, I would like to thank the organizers for their perfectly organized workshop and the panelists and all the participants for their active and enthusiastic approach. It was a pleasure for me to chair such an interesting and inspiring workshop.
