December 6, 2007

The enforced Law on Copyright and Related Rights (“Official Gazette of SMN” no 61/04) is solid legislative creation with quality solutions, logically and systematically firm structure and successful terminological foundation. However, three years of the enforcement of the enforced Law on Copyright and Related Rights showed certain shortcomings in several legal solutions, which should be improved, and, at the same time, for the sake of realization of tendency of our country to strive towards all the more firm integration into the international community and the harmonization of our legislation with the legislation of the international community, a need appeared for further streamlining and more complete harmonization of this Law with one of the directives of the European Union, namely the Directive on the Coordination of Certain Rules Concerning Copyright and Rights Related to Copyright Applicable to Satellite Broadcasting and Cable Retransmission (93/83) – Directive on Satellite Emission and Cable Retransmission, so that in practice the question of cable retransmission should be founded on European solutions.

Interventions proposed by these amendments are done so that respect was shown towards terminology and inner logic of the Law, so that the text of the Law with the performed amendments shall remain coherent and stylistically tempered.

The proposed solutions from the Draft Law on the Amendments of the Law on Copyright and Related Right are the result of checking certain solutions in practice. The number of amendments is not numerous, and the majority of them are the fine adaptation of the text with the aim of the more complete harmonization with the international standards.

Since it concerns the regulation of the issues that the public is especially interested with, it is our intention by presenting the Draft Law on the Amendments of the Law on Copyright and Related Rights on the site of the Intellectual Property Office, to inform the public on the content of the amendments.

Draft Law on the Amendments of the Law on Copyright and Related Rights (Only in Serbian) (pdf)