The Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) increasingly faces societal value‐conflicts in EU law disputes. For example, in EU copyright law, in the digital age, diverse fundamental values, as well as cultural and societal developments, are at stake. This article discusses the role of the CJEU in the European value discourse, using copyright law as a case study. The methodological approach used, critical discourse analysis, is seldom applied in jurisprudential studies, but is well suited for teasing out value‐related aspects of case law. Exploratory research of seminal copyright cases suggests that the CJEU's discourse of the various values seems unnecessarily one‐sided and shallow. A lack of discursiveness in the jurisprudence would diminish the legitimacy of the Court's decisions, and would not offer adequate guidance to national courts or private decision‐makers, to whom the Court at the same time may be leaving more of the task of value reconciliation.
This paper asks to what extent the European Commission's stakeholder participation model takes into account non-expert citizen contributions in policy processes pertaining to copyright. In theory, the increasing scale of citizen engagement in stakeholder consultations on copyright could help address the EU's democratic deficit. The paper analyses the European Commission's consultation processes in copyright policy across the Barroso 1&2 and Juncker Commissions (2004)(2005)(2006)(2007)(2008)(2009)(2010)(2011)(2012)(2013)(2014)(2015)(2016)(2017)(2018)(2019). It documents the scale and the type of stakeholder involvement in public consultations. Through expert interviews and a survey, the paper gives critical insight into stakeholders' perception of the Commission's consultation practices and citizens' role in policymaking. It concludes that the Commission is inclusive of different types of stakeholders, but casts doubt on the (perceived) motivation and appropriateness of its stakeholder participation model for non-expert citizens. The paper thus sheds light on the attempts and the struggle to engage with citizens in a digital age.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.