11 - Conclusions

Summary

In this book I have shown that most sophisticated multimedia works do not fit in easily with the existing copyright works' regimes of protection. Before I go any further and discuss the ideal regime of protection for multimedia works, it is interesting to consider a recent French case which confirms the point that the existing copyright regimes of protection are not suitable for multimedia works. The Court of Appeal in Paris, in a case concerned with an encyclopaedia on CD-ROM, came to the conclusion that the multimedia work at issue could not come within the categories of audiovisual works, collective works or collaborative works. It could not qualify as an audiovisual work on two grounds. First, it did not present a linear unfolding of sequences of images since the user could intervene and modify the order of sequences by means of interactivity. Secondly, the encyclopaedia did not contain a succession of moving images but only fixed sequences, which could contain moving images. These two points seemed to lie outside the notion of audiovisual works under art. L112-2 of the French Copyright Act. The multimedia work was also found not to be a collective work on the basis that the person who published and disclosed the work was not the person who initiated its creation nor the person who was responsible for the scenario, direction and organisation of the work's interactivity. The publication of a work by a publisher alone does not suffice to render it a collective work.