Do the Math! – Copyright Infringements and Damages
Do the Math! – Copyright Infringements and Damages

Summary/Abstract: Copyright law seems to have been centred around the concept of wrongfulness in the past few decades mainly because the rapid development of technologies attached to the information society have made infringes easy and relatively cheap for the users. The study analyses theories, doctrines, and concepts formed around the question on how to award damages for copyright infringes to the copyright holder in the European Union. To conclude some recommendations and changes in the practice of awarding and calculating damages in copyright infringement cases, the article systemizes and criticizes various approaches of judicial practice in EU member states in relation to two core problems: assessing and calculating lost profits of the copyright holder and awarding moral damages for the infringement of the author’s moral rights. The study is not a case analysis; instead, it confronts different ideas and theoretical bases on the preconditions of awarding damages and some common techniques on the calculation of the actual loss. While the EU is far from achieving harmonization in tort law, cases of copyright infringements are typically international in the 21st century; therefore, national laws should at least agree on similar frameworks when reinterpreting and restructuring old tort law lemmas and institutions. The article attempts to provide a starting point to support this work.

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