Almost everyone agrees that modern copyright law needs to be flexible in order to accommodate rapid technological change and evolving media uses. In the United States, fair use is the flexible instrument of choice. Author’s rights systems in Europe are generally deemed to be less flexible and less tolerant to open-ended limitations and exceptions. But are they really?

This chapter makes the case that (1) author’s rights systems can be made as flexible as copyright systems, and (2) that the existing EU legal framework does not preclude the development of flexible norms at the national level.