Roma Leuyerink is working on a dissertation with the working title 'Naar een evenwichtigere verhouding tussen auteurs en exploitanten'.
After research showed that authors are in a structurally weaker negotiating position, the Dutch legislator introduced rules of authors' contract law in 2015 to strengthen that position. In the final report accompanying the Evaluation of the Copyright Contracts Act, the researchers concluded in September 2020 that it is still too early to assess across the full breadth of the Act whether it has already achieved its goals, but it does identify the necessary bottlenecks and ambiguities in the application and interpretation of the Act, and its impact on contractual practice appears to be little noticed yet. Meanwhile, the Union legislator has also seen a need to intervene in the aforementioned relationship, so that copyright contract law is largely harmonised. However, the implementation of the DSM Directive has led to few adjustments. In a series of articles, solutions or handles for the identified legal bottlenecks and ambiguities are provided, always with a view to a more balanced relationship between authors and operators.