Remix prohibited : how rigid EU copyright laws inhibit creativity

With the emergence of the digital environment, the issue of ‘transformative uses’ in copyright law has gained renewed interest in legal literature.While many authors have emphasized the challenge that these transformative practices presented for copyright law, there has been a clear lack of comprehensive study of the extent of copyright law’s hostility to such practices, in particular the non digital ones. In addition, too little attention has been paid to possible solutions to resolve this conflict within the copyright regime.This is the first of two papers that seek to fill these two gaps. In this first paper we will provide a comprehensive assessment of the status of trans- formative uses in EU, Belgian and French law, informed by a vast body of case law. In the second paper, we will discuss potential solutions drawing inspiration from Canadian copyright law, which has recently experienced both the introduction of a legal exception for user generated content, and a court-led shift from a traditional closed-list fair dealing system to a broader, semi-open system of exceptions and limitations.