Our paper argues that fair competition in music streaming is restricted by the nature of the remuneration arrangements between creators and the streaming platforms, the role of playlists, and the strong negotiating power of the major labels. It concludes that urgent consideration should be given to a user-centric payment system, as well as greater transparency of the factors underpinning playlist creation and of negotiated agreements.

While the US have already taken steps to provide an integrated data space for music as of 1 January 2021, the EU is facing major obstacles not only in the field of music but also in other creative industry sectors. Weighing costs and benefits, there can be little doubt that new data improvement initiatives and sufficient investment in a better copyright data infrastructure should play a central role in EU copyright policy. A trade-off between data harmonisation and interoperability on the one hand, and transparency and accountability of content recommender systems on the other, could pave the way for successful new initiatives.

The topic of the paper is Library Genesis (LG), the biggest piratical scholarly library on the internet, which provides copyright infringing access to more than 2.5 million scientific monographs, edited volumes, and textbooks. The paper uses advanced statistical methods to explain why researchers around the globe use copyright infringing knowledge resources. The analysis is based on a huge usage dataset from LG, as well as data from the World Bank, Eurostat, and Eurobarometer, to identify the role of macroeconomic factors, such as R&D and higher education spending, GDP, researcher density in scholarly copyright infringing activities.

The results of the first Hungarian, Slovak, Croatian and Czech music industry reports are compared with Armenian, Austrian, Bulgarian, Lithuanian, Serbian and Slovenian data and findings.