Regulation of user-generated content in copyright law

This master's thesis examines the copyright norms governing user-generated content and assesses whether they are suitable for regulating the institute of online creation. Although the concept of user-generated content is not new, its origins are linked to the emergence of social media platforms in the beginning of the 21st century. However, no consensus has yet been found among legal scholars on how to reconcile user creation with the interests of copyright holders, where digital tools allow users to reproduce, publish, distribute, use and process copyright content indefinitely, yet controlling any such use is hardly possible. Major attention is paid to the Digital Single Market directive (DSM directive), adopted on 17 April 2019. The directive was highly expected to provide for a solution to the legal dilemma of the compatibility of user-generated content and copyright law. It introduced a new type of regulation for user-generated content, rendering social media platform operators directly liabile for copyright infringement. Accordingly, the paper examines the similarities and differences between the liability regimes of internet intermediaries in the Anglo-American copyright and the continental Europe droit d’auteur legal traditions and analyzes the development of these regimes. It is considered why the forced introduction of the role of online intermediaries in content filtering in the European Union is not an appropriate solution to the problem of user-generated content in the context of copyright. Alternatives are proposed, as to how the copyright reform of the European Union may be developed in the future in order to achieve better legislative results. The paper emphasizes that user-generated content should not be subject to regular copyright rules because their purposes do not reflect the realities of the digital world. Accordingly, the idea of an exception for user-generated content (even that of a commercial nature), which could be included in the Information Society Directive, is proposed