“There is no such thing as an Internal Market in Europe”

at least when dealing with intellectual property.

The European Union is an Economic Union, using harmonisation of laws and trade agreement we have a large economic zone of free trade. The European Union also tried to harmonise copyright law in 2001 and partially succeeded. OutOfCopyright.eu is the product of two years of research of the Institute of Information Law, Kennisland and a range of volunteers from 30 countries. OutOfCopyright.eu and its derivatives couldn’t have existed without the work of lead legal researcher Christina Angelopoulos.

The site tries to answer the question: “Has copyright protection over a work expired in a European country?”. A question that, given a harmonised European copyright law should give on answer across the entire Union, instead it needs to give 30 different answers.

I was software developer, architect and researcher on this project.