Page 246 - A Study on the Role of UGC Platforms in Copyright Law：An Intermediary-oriented Approach

A Study on the Role of UGC Platforms in Copyright Law: Chapter 8 Concluding Remarks
An Intermediary-oriented Approach

fundamental problem with the current copyright law lies in the betrayal of the intermediary-
oriented tradition found in earlier copyright law.

8.2 Contributions of the Study

8.2.1 Intermediary-oriented approach underpinning copyright law

This study discovered that copyright law has been underpinned by an intermediary-
oriented approach which, by focusing on intermediaries’ interests and by balancing
intermediaries’ interests, secures end users’ access to and use of copyrighted works. I
identified two types of important intermediaries in copyright law: producers and distributors.
Producers are those who make large-scale productions of copies of copyrighted works and
who own copyright of these works. Typical examples of producers exclude publishing
houses, record labels and film studios. Because of producers’ capacity of self-financing
cultural production, their cross-subsdisation strategy by investing in a diversified portolio
of copyrighted works, and their ability to achieve economies of scale, granting copyright
to producers, in turn, allows end users to have easy access to a diverse range of cultural
products at a reasonably low price.
What has more often been overlooked is the distributors in copyright law. Distributors
are the providers of devices and service through which users can consume copyrighted
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works in a new channel or medium. Until the first half of the 20 century, distributors were
direct users of copyrighted works (named as user-distributors in this thesis). For example,
manufacturers of piano rolls mechanically reproduced and publicly performed musical
compositions on piano rolls. Broadcasters played magnetic recordings and invoked public
performance rights. In addition to exclusive proprietary regimes, user-distributors were
regularly governed by compulsory licensing schemes as a way to balance copyright owners’/
producers’ incentives in cultural production and distributors’ incentives in developing new
distribution technology. End users, in turn, can enjoy a wide range of copyrighted works
through the latest technology at a low price.
With technical advances in such areas as photocopying and digital recording, the ability
to reproduce works was transferred from professional distributors to a large number of
individual users. Nevertheless, copyright law still imposed liability, not on users but on
the distributors who facilitated and profited from the users’ use of the copyrighted works
in the new distribution channel (called as facilitator-distributors in this thesis). Facilitator-
distributors were accommodated by levy schemes which protect end users from copyright
infringement lawsuit as long as the use of the copyrighted works is for personal, non-
commercial purpose.
By exploring the copyright history, this thesis found that copyright law has adopted an
intermediary-oriented approach to balance the interests between producers and distributors
through a series of non-proprietary regimes such as compulsory license, reasonable fee

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