Copyright and human rights in the ballroom: a minuet between the US and the EU

The overall purpose of this work is to analyze the extent to which the approach in the EU differs to the one in the US. To do so the paper first looks at the essence of the internal and external safeguards as such (§ II). We then turn our focus to the leading case law in the US by reference to the Supreme Court and some of the most prominent US Courts of Appeals judgments and compare it to the CJEU’s practice. In this respect we seek to verify whether and to what extent the decision-making process in the two jurisdictions has converged or diverged over the years (§ III). In the final part (§ IV) we conclude the discourse and suggest that at the moment it seems like the two systems are now dancing sideways hand-in-hand in the same direction.