ABSTRACT
This article investigates important shifts in the way that rights are enforced in the EU. On the one hand, the Commission is increasingly withdrawing from centralised rights enforcement, initiating less and less infringement proceedings and shifting the bulk of its work towards more informal compliance management tools. At the same time, private, de-centralised rights enforcement is becoming more prominent, at least as measured by the amount of preliminary references submitted to the CJEU. The Commission actively supports this trend, and in effect outsources its own enforcement work to private actors, both individual and collective. The article outlines Commission efforts to facilitate private enforcement and discusses whether private enforcement can substitute for centralised enforcement. It concludes that all channels of rights enforcement have a role to play, and the loss of any single channel cannot easily be compensated.
