The digital economy has been a major driver of growth in the past two decades, and is expected to grow seven times faster than overall EU GDP in coming years. In Europe, the value of EU recorded music alone is €6bn with creative industries accounting for 3% of EU27 employment (around 6.7m jobs). There are new ways of providing, creating and distributing content online with new ways of generating value, and there is still more economic potential to be drawn from creative industries in Europe.Copyrights, the rights granted to authors and performers, producers and broadcasters to ensure that those who have created or invested in the creation can receive remuneration for it, have significant economic and social importance. As such, the European Commission aims to ensure that copyright and copyright-related practices, such as licensing, remain fit for purpose in the current digital age. The Collective Rights Management Directive (2012) hopes to encourage multi-territorial licensing of rights and ease the licensing of authors’ rights for the use of content on the internet, leading to improved cross-border access to, and more offer of, digital content online.Whilst good progress has been made in delivering the copyright-related actions identified in the Digital Agenda and the Intellectual Property Strategy, work still needs to be done to ensure an effective single market in the area of copyright. The task of the European Commission is to enforce the “acquis” on copyright and related rights to advance it further and to modernise and adapt it to new developments in technology or the markets concerned. Furthermore, in July 2012 the European Commission proposed measures to modernise collecting societies and put in place incentives to promote their transparency and efficiency.This timely international symposium provides an invaluable opportunity for key stakeholders within the public and private sector to explore the measures that are being taken to tackle territorial fragmentation of copyright laws and move towards a borderless EU digital single market, with access to content guaranteed across all Member States.