European Parliament versus Commission: How to deal with collecting societies?

As a veteran of the Max Planck Institute for Intellectual Property, Competition and Tax Law (formerly Max Planck Institute for Patent, Copyright and Competition Law) I have known Bill Cornish for a pretty long time. Many years ago, like other important professors and researchers in the field of intellectual property from all over the world, Bill Cornish, then a brilliant, young, dynamic and universally interested scholar of Australian origin, was also engaged in research work in our comparative law institute in Munich. In addition to his fluency in German and French, this background may have stimulated his interest in "continental" solutions to legal problems, in particular in the field of copyright,(1) my own favourite field of research. Nobody will be surprised then to hear that a friendship developed between us, and a continuous exchange of ideas, certainly also of critical views of each other's positions, has continued over decades now. This was facilitated by the fact that Bill Cornish, soon after his research stay at the Max Planck Institute, was nominated one of its External Academic Members (which he still is), and that he has an office here. Consequently I often had the chance to meet him, sometimes very surprisingly, in the corridors of the MPI. Of course, we would often meet in other places, such as Paris, Geneva, London, Cambridge or Berlin, on a congress cruise in the Aegean Sea, even on a river in the Yosemite Park in California, or in other important places of the world where the Association Litteraire et Artistique Internationale (ALAI) or other international associations or organisations held their meetings and congresses. In a word, we shared many battles in the copyright field and, it is hoped, will share others in the future, one of which is probably going to be over collecting societies.