20 | 09 | 2018
“AGORATEKA” – The Roadshow on the Project of Integrating Legal Digital Sources of Online Entertainment Content
On 12 September 2018, the roadshow was held at the premises of the Croatian Employers’ Association in Zagreb – “Promotion of Legal Digital Sources of Cultural and Entertainment Content – a project of the European Union AGORATEKA“. The meeting was organised by the State Intellectual Property Office, supported by the Coordination Board for the Enforcement of Intellectual Property Rights and in cooperation with the European Union Intellectual Property Office (EUIPO).
The EUIPO’s representatives presented Croatian stakeholders in the field of production and protection of cultural and entertainment content the AGORATEKA project, which integrates structured legal cultural and entertainment content online supplied by the European Union Member States via appropriate internet portal; this content usually includes works protected by copyright and related rights. The establishment of AGORATEKA was initiated after results of numerous research works and studies conducted by the EUIPO had been analysed.
The survey titled “European Citizens and Intellectual Property: Perception, Awareness, and Behaviour”, conducted in the course of 2016 as a follow-up to the similar research conducted earlier, has shown that European citizens are generally inclined to the protection of intellectual property rights and 97% of those surveyed agree that it is important that inventors, creators and performing artists can protect their rights and be paid for their work. As to the access to digital content protected by copyright and related rights, 83% of the surveyed would give preference to legal means to access online content whenever available and affordable. Furthermore, 71% of respondents who accessed online copyright content using illegal sources mention to be willing to stop with this practice if this content would be available and affordable from legal sources. The survey has also shown that consumers, especially younger age groups, were often unsure when accessing copyright content online if a source was legal or it was a matter of the so-called pirated websites.
Currently, the AGORATEKA portal integrates portals with legal national online content in 16 EU Member States in total, and Switzerland joined the portal as well. The aim of this initiative was to integrate national portals of all the EU Member States, in order to provide European citizens with fast and simple access to legal cultural and entertainment content protected by copyright and related rights supplied online, which also implies adequate and legal access to a significant part of the cultural heritage of the Union (music, films, e-books, etc.). An example of setting up a national portal of Portugal, as a country also involved in the AGORATEKA project, was presented at the roadshow.
Considering the fact that this survey has also shown respondents from the Republic of Croatia still accessing copyright content legally to a much lesser extent compared with the European average (as little as 14% in relation to 27% of all European citizens), the need was recognised to set up a portal to integrate legal content supplied online, relevant for the Republic of Croatia, which would also join the AGORATEKA portal in order to promote national content in other EU Member States as well. Therefore, representatives of creative and culture industries i.e. copyright and related rights holders and their organisations and associations operating in the Republic of Croatia are invited in the upcoming period to get actively involved in the preparations of such national portal and to focus their efforts in general to strengthening legal offer of online content protected by copyright and related rights.