Carbon Market Provisions in the Paris Agreement (Article 6). CEPS Special Report No. 128/January 2016

The markets provisions, contained in Article 6 of the Paris Agreement adopted in December 2015, can be seen as both a major success and a minor miracle. Throughout 2015, and during COP21 itself, the prediction was for a very small reference to anything related to markets, or possibly even the total omission of any such reference in the text. As predicted, the markets/non-markets text in Article 6 of the Paris Agreement (PA) was one of the last issues to be agreed, in the last night of COP21, shortly before the text went to the COP President, French Foreign Minister Laurent Fabius, for final approval and its subsequent release to the delegates for acceptance on 12 December 2015. This paper presents the evolution of the ideas contained in Article 6 of the Paris Agreement, and how these were captured in textual form in different drafts of the agreement. Understanding the origin of different provisions in the PA, and their evolution, may prove crucial. Losing the institutional memory may lead to attempts, through re-interpretation of the PA, to renegotiate it.

Regulation on ‘cross-border portability’ of online content services: Roaming for Netflix or the end of copyright territoriality? CEPS Commentary, 15 February 2016

In a communication to the Parliament and the Council entitled “Towards a modern, more European copyright framework” and dated 9 December 2015,1 the European Commission confirmed its intention to progressively remove the main obstacles to the functioning of the Digital Single Market for copyrighted works. The first step of this long-term plan, which was first announced in Juncker’s Political Guidelines2 and the Communication on “A Digital Single Market strategy for Europe”,3 is a proposal for a regulation aimed at ensuring the so-called ‘cross-border portability’ of online services giving access to content such as music, games, films and sporting events.4 In a nutshell, the proposed regulation seeks to enable consumers with legal access to such online content services in their country of residence to use the same services also when they are in another member state for a limited period of time. On the one hand, this legislative proposal has the full potential to resolve the (limited) issue of portability, which stems from the national dimension of copyright and the persisting territorial licensing and distribution of copyright content.5 On the other hand, as this commentary shows, the ambiguity of certain important provisions in the proposed regulation might affect its scope and effectiveness and contribute to the erosion of the principle of copyright territoriality.