Bulgarian record labels have told the European Commission that it should make sure EU member states have actually implemented all existing European copyright rules properly before it introduces any new ones. Starting with Bulgaria.
The country’s label trade group BAMP has formally shared that position with the Commission after failing to secure web-blocks against piracy sites The Pirate Bay and Zamunda earlier this year. Bulgaria’s Supreme Court ruled that the country’s lawmakers hadn’t fully implemented EU copyright rules that would justify anti-piracy web-blocking.
That ruling, says BAMP, “illustrates the importance of ensuring the full and correct implementation of the existing EU law across all member states before considering further legislative initiatives”. And therefore the Commission should ensure that all member states have “correctly implemented all the measures and procedures” in past EU copyright directives.
Web-blocking is where copyright owners secure injunctions ordering internet companies - most commonly internet service providers - to block their customers from accessing specific piracy websites. It has been an anti-piracy tactic of choice for the music industry for many years now.
How easy it is to secure web-blocking injunctions varies greatly from country to country. In some countries web-blocks are easy to secure and generally uncontroversial. In other countries, like Bulgaria, web-blocking has involved greater legal challenges and much more controversy.
BAMP and global record industry trade group IFPI began legal efforts to secure the first anti-piracy web-blocks in Bulgaria back in 2020, targeting the good old Pirate Bay and popular torrent site Zamunda. But those efforts were ultimately blocked earlier this year by the Supreme Court.
In a summary of that ruling published back in March, law firm Dimitrov, Petrov & Co explained how the Supreme Court ruled that “under current Bulgarian copyright legislation”, record labels and other relevant rights owners “cannot obtain injunctions in standard civil copyright proceedings to require ISPs to block access to well-known pirate websites”.
The top court then stated that “although EU law requires mechanisms for injunctions against certain ‘intermediaries’, Bulgaria has not fully transposed these rules into national copyright law in a way that enables permanent blocking injunctions through ordinary copyright litigation”.
The Supreme Court specifically mentioned the 2001 EU copyright directive and the 2004 intellectual property rights enforcement directive, or IPRED for short. With EU directives, each member state needs to update their national laws to be in sync with European law. In theory Bulgaria should have updated its copyright regime so that it complied with both those directives before it joined the EU in 2007.
BAMP formally raised its web-blocking woes in a submission to the Commission last month - which has just been spotted by Torrentfreak - as part of a general call for evidence from interested parties across Europe on “possible targeted measures to modernise the EU copyright framework”.