Von Lewinski, who warned in her speech against NGOs and public interest groups active on copyright issues who she said were really fronts for telcos and ISPs, assured the audience that there were no problems with the digital lock rules in Europe with only one complaint in the many years since it was established (a positioned echoed by Mihaly Ficsor later in the day). It should be noted that other studies, such as this exhaustive one from the Institute for Information Law at the University of Amsterdam commissioned by the European Commission’s Internal Market Directorate General, come to a much different conclusion. It found numerous problems with situation in Europe, recommending:
To remedy the lack of legal certainty and harmonisation with respect to the legal protection of TPMs, and to align the European provisions with the EU’s international obligations under the WIPO Treaties, the EC legislator should consider clarifying the legal framework in four respects. First, the prohibition on acts of circumvention should only find application in circumstances where the act of circumvention results in copyright infringement.
