Article 17 implementation: German proposal strengthens the right of user and creators

Rechtvaardigheid (Justitia)
A more balanced way to implement Article 17
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It speaks to the complexity of the discussion about Article 17 of the Copyright in the Digital Single Market directive that the new German implementation proposal is at the same time a broken promise and something that sets a positive example for the other Member States. The measures to implement Article 17 unveiled today as part of a wider proposal for implementing a second set of provisions of the directive (which we will discuss in a follow up post), do not manage to keep the earlier promise to avoid the use of upload filters and instead embrace their use within certain limits. This will almost certainly be a major point of political controversy within Germany.

But seen from the other 26 EU member states this broken promise will likely be overshadowed by the fact that the German government is setting an example for fully using the room for legislative discretion left by the directive to include a number of significant protections for users together with measures aimed at ensuring that individual creators directly benefit from the new provisions. In doing so the German implementation proposal is the first proposal that does not limit itself to (selectively) transposing the provisions of the directive into national law. As a result of this, the German implementation proposal is much closer to the legislative compromise struck by Article 17 than any of the other implementations that we have seen so far.

The implementation proposal (which represents the position of the Ministry of Justice and still needs to be endorsed by the government as a whole) proposes to implement Article 17 in a new law that is separate from the main Copyright Act. This new “Gesetz über die urheberrechtliche Verantwortlichkeit von Diensteanbietern für das Teilen von Online-Inhalten” (UrhDaG) follows the overall logic of Article 17 in making OCSSPs first liable for infringements by their users and then requiring them to either license or take measures to prevent the availability of infringing works to limit their liability.

To ensure the balance of the resulting provision the proposal adds a number of provisions aimed at safeguarding the ability of users to freely share and receive information and for creators to be remunerated for such uses of their works. These measures include: Continue reading →

Member States watch: User rights safeguards must be fully implemented into national laws

The Letter Writer
Submissions in Hungary and the Netherlands
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As part of our implementation project we are tracking the national implementations of the DSM directive in the different EU member states and are working together with local advocates and civil society organisations to make sure that national implementations are as good as possible from the users and public interest perspectives. As part of this work we are also occasionally providing input into national legislative processes. Earlier this week we made a submission to the public consultation in Hungary and expressed concerns about shortcomings of the Dutch implementation law in a letter to the Dutch Parliament.

Hungary: The importance of the pastiche exception

Last month the Hungarian Ministry of Justice and the Hungarian Intellectual Property Office (HIPO) published a consultation proposal on the transposition of the DSm directive into Hungarian law.

Hungary is one of the EU member states that currently does not have an exception for parody, caricature or pastiche in their Copyright Act. Article 17(7) of the DSM directive requires all Member States to “ensure that users […] are able to rely” on exceptions or limitations authorising use “for the purpose of caricature, parody or pastiche”. Consequently Hungary must introduce such an exception as part of the implementation of the directive. The consultation proposal identified two different options to meet this requirement:

  • an exception allowing “anyone to use any work for the purposes of (…) parody by evoking the original work and by expressing humour or mockery” (Option A), or
  • an exception allowing “anyone to use any work for the purposes of (…) creating a parody, caricature or pastiche” (Option B).

In our submission to the consultation (Hungarian, English) we pointed out that Option A, by omitting caricature and parody, fails to properly implement the DSM directive and that therefore the Hungarian legislator should go with Option B. Option B, in line with our longstanding position on exceptions and limitations in the EU copyright framework, recommends to closely follow the language of the exception contained in Article 5(3)(k) of the Information Society Directive. By taking over the wording of the prototype exception and leaving the interpretation of the concepts of parody, caricature and pastiche to the courts, Option B takes full advantage of the policy space that is available to Member States and enables the harmonization of these concepts across the EU. This is especially important since in the context of Article 17, the concept of pastiche will likely become an important safeguard for the freedom of expression. Continue reading →

Our DSM Directive Implementation Tracker is out

The finish in the great match race [...] at Sheepshead Bay, N.Y., June 25th, 1890 between Salvator and Tenny / L.M.Licentie
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Today we are launching our new DSM Directive Implementation Tracker.

These tracking pages aim to provide information on the status of the implementation of the new Copyright Directive in all EU Member States. The information contained in each country page was collected by local organisations and individuals in each country and/or from public sources.

This tracker is part of a wider implementation project of COMMUNIA and its members Centrum Cyfrowe and Wikimedia, which includes a range of activities (including our DSM Directive Implementation Guidelines) to make sure that local communities in as many Member States as possible are aware of their national legislative processes and participate in those processes.  

What is the current status of the implementation?

One year after the entry into force of the DSM Directive, the implementation picture is very varied. So far only one member state (France) has adopted one element of the Directive (the new press publishers right) into national law.

There are currently two member states with implementation law proposals tabled in their national parliaments. In France a proposal implementing articles 17 – 22 of the Directive has cleared committee and is awaiting first reading in plenary. In the Netherlands a proposal implementing the entire Directive has just been introduced into parliament and is awaiting reading in the legal affairs committee.Continue reading →

A better way to implement Article 17? New German proposal to avoid overblocking

Jakobs ladder
A step-by-step concept against overblocking
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Back in April 2019, at the occasion of the final vote on the DSM Directive in the Council, the German Federal Government issued a statement, announcing that it intended to implement Article 17 with a focus on “preventing ‘upload filters’ wherever possible, ensuring freedom of expression and safeguarding user rights”. While the German Government has yet to produce an implementation proposal for Article 17, we may now have gotten a first insight in what such an implementation might look like. Late last month, the Kölner Forschungsstelle für Medienrecht at the University of Applied Sciences in Cologne, published a step-by-step concept for implementing Article 17 of the DSM Directive (“Stufenkonzept gegen Overblocking durch Uploadfilter“). 

The paper authored by Prof. Dr. Rolf Schwartmann and Prof. Dr. Christian-Henner Hentsch consists of an implementation proposal in the form of concrete legislative language. The objective of the authors seems to be to stay as close as possible to the objectives formulated in the German statement to the Council. What makes this proposal remarkable is that it is the first proposal (although not an official one) for implementing the Article 17 of the new Copyright Directive that does not consist of more or less literal transposition of Article 17 into national law (as it is the case in the French, Dutch and Belgian legislative proposals). In order to achieve the stated objective of preventing over-blocking by upload filters, the concept proposes a combination of Article 17 with Article 12 of the DSM Directive (which provides Member States the option to introduce Extended Collective Licenses). 

The implementation proposal contains modifications of three different acts: the Copyright Act (Urheberrechtsgesetz – UrhG), the Tele Media Act (Telemediengesetz – TMG) and the Collective Management Organisations Act (Verwertungsgesellschaftengesetz – VGG). Specifically the authors propose the following modifications: 

In the Copyright Act, they propose to add a new section to the article (§ 19a UrhG) that defines the act of communication to the public. The purpose of this addition is to include acts of giving the public access to copyright-protected user uploaded works by Online Content Service Providers (OCSSPs) in the definition of the existing making available to the public right. This establishes that, in principle, OCSSPs need authorisation from rightholders for such acts. The added section also includes the definition of OCSSPs, which is a literal transposition of the definition used in the DSM directive. 

The second addition to the Copyright Act is a new exception covering uses for the purpose of caricature, parody or pastiche by users of OCSSPs (§ 51a UrhG). Notably, this exception only applies in the context of sharing works via OCSSPs (which is highly unusual as copyright exceptions are usually not limited to specific services) and is conditional on remuneration to rightholders via collective management organisations. Continue reading →

Article 17: Both French and Dutch implementation proposals lack key user rights safeguards

Allegory of the Alliance with France
Selective implementations sacrifice user rights
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As of January 2020 there are two Member States that have published legislative proposals for the implementation of Article 17 CDSM. In July the Netherlands published a proposal for an implementation law for public consultation that implemented all provisions of the CDSM directive. Then, in early December, France published the proposal for a project for a law on audiovisual communication and cultural sovereignty in the digital era that implements some of the CDSM directive provisions, including Article 17 (see a first analysis of the French proposal by Julia Reda here).

These first implementation proposals are coming from a main proponent of Article 17 (France) and one of the most vocal opponents (Netherlands), and allow us to get a first impression of how Member States across the EU are likely going to deal with this controversial article. Irrespective of the different positions by France and the Netherlands during the directive negotiations, the implementation proposed by both Member States do not diverge much from each other. 

Both the laws stay very close to the text of the directive: The French implementation largely follows the order of the different sections of the directive via two nearly identical articles, one dealing with copyright (L137) and the other dealing with related rights (L219). The Dutch implementation law follows its own structure and introduces 3 articles (29c, 29d and 29e) that deal with copyright and one article (19b) that declares these articles to also apply to neighbouring rights. 

Selective implementations

The general approach chosen by both legislators is to transpose the text of Article 17 (paragraphs 1-6 and 8 and the definition of online content-sharing service providers (OCSSP) from article 2(6)) as closely as possible into their national law.

Neither of the legislators transposes paragraph 17(7) (that introduces crucial safeguards protecting uses under exceptions and limitations) and both only transpose parts of paragraph 17(9) (that imposes an obligation on OCSSPs to operate a complaint and redress mechanisms for users in the event of disputes over the takedown and staydown procedures). None of the legislators provide any further guidance on how platforms are supposed to meet the requirement to make “best efforts to obtain authorisation” from rightholders. Continue reading →

Our Guidelines for the Implementation of the DSM Directive

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We are thrilled to release our Guidelines for Implementation of the DSM Directive.

These guidelines explain different provisions of the new Copyright Directive and make suggestions on what to advocate for during the implementation process of those provisions in the EU Member States. They are aimed at local advocates and national policy makers, and have the general objective of expanding and strengthening user rights at a national level beyond what is strictly prescribed by the new Directive. 

Communia partnered with LIBER (Articles 3 and 4), IFLA (Article 6) and Europeana (Articles 8 to 11) for the creation of these guidelines. The guidelines are part of a wider implementation project of COMMUNIA and its members Centrum Cyfrowe and Wikimedia, which includes a range of activities (including our transposition bootcamp) to make sure that local communities in as many Member States as possible participate in their national legislative processes.  

There is room for improvement in the DSM Directive

The two and a half years of public discussions of the new Copyright Directive were largely centred on a small number of problematic clauses (the press publishers right and the upload filters). However, the Directive also includes a number of provisions that improve the existing EU copyright rules (a number of new copyright exceptions and protections for the public domain).

While the national implementations will have to include all the problematic aspects of the new Copyright Directive, there is some room for meaningful improvements, and some measures can be taken to mitigate the worst provisions of the Directive. The EU Member States have until 7 June 2021 to implement the Directive into their national laws. 

Expanding and strengthening user rights

Our detailed proposals try to achieve the general objective of expanding and strengthening user rights by suggesting that, during the national implementation process, Member States make use of the following flexibilities: Continue reading →

Canadian copyright report: Let’s wait and see how upload filters and press publishers rights will fail.

Waiting for the ferry
A sceptical take on the EU copyright reform
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Last week the Canadian Parliament’s Standing Committee on Industry, Science and Technology (INDU) released a report with 36 recommendations to reform Canadian copyright law. Under Canadian law the committee is required to review the Canadian copyright statutes every five years and the report presented now is the outcome of such a review. While this means that it is relatively unlikely that many of the recommendations contained in the report will result in immediate legislative actions (the government is not required to act on them) the report is nevertheless interesting as it contains a number of recommendations that go in the opposite direction of the changes that the DSM directive will bring to copyright in the European Union (for a full overview of the recommendations see Michael Geist’s summary).

After a year-long study that includes a public consultation and a number of committee hearings on a wide variety of issues, the INDU committee has come to the conclusion that there is a lack of evidence for both a DSM-style press publishers right and for changes to the liability position of platform intermediaries as foreseen in Article 17 of the DSM directive. While Canadian rightsholders argued for the necessity of such interventions, they failed to convince the committee of the merits for these provisions.

On the press publishers right the report essentially takes a wait and see approach (i.e. to see just how badly the EU will fail on these points) that conveys a healthy amount of scepticism with regard to the effectiveness of the EU approach.

The production and dissemination of news content is essential to democratic societies. While the Committee supports the notion that OSPs who profit from the dissemination of copyrighted content they do not own should fairly remunerate its rights-holders, legislators around the world are only starting to develop and implement legislative frameworks to compel OSPs to do so. Canada should learn from the failures and successes of these initiatives to determine whether they serve the interests of Canadians. (page 53)

The report goes on to discuss potential changes to the “Safe Harbour Provisions” that apply to online service providers. Unsurprisingly this discussion is based on the “value gap” rhetoric that provided the germ of the upload filtering provisions contained in Article 17 of the DSM directive. The section on “Safe Harbour Provisions” (pages 74-83) is well worth reading as it makes it clear that there is no such thing as a single “value gap” that can be filled via a legislative intervention, and that changing the liability rules for online service providers will have damaging effects well beyond the music sector: Continue reading →

Is the Bulgarian Article 13 Compromise a French affair?

Kaart van de Balkan
Bulgaria should oppose censorship filters!
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The Bulgarian EU Presidency is under immense pressure to move the copyright reform forward. Yet it seems like the country is too timid to defend its own interests. A new campaign kicked off in Sofia to try and change that.

Somewhere far out in the uncharted backwaters of the unfashionable end of the EU lies a small unregarded country—Bulgaria. In 2018 this Member State will not only be known for resonant voices and rampant corruption, but also for its prominent role in the EU copyright reform. While it holds the rotating Presidency of the Council of the EU it is up to the Bulgarian government to propose new compromises and bring the discussion forward in order to reach a common position between Member States.

But the Council is not Bulgaria’s only copyright stronghold at the moment. The reform falls in the competences of the country’s Commissioner Mariya Gabriel, and 10% of the votes in the lead European Parliament committee (Legal Affairs) are to be cast by MEPs from parties currently making up its governing coalition.

The Bulgarian Compromise, a French Affair?

At the end of 2017 the Council negotiations hit somewhat of a stalemate and the Estonian Presidency was forced to give up, unnerved after trying for months to square the circle between the content industry’s bold demands and fundamental rights for users and the public.

Apparently the Bulgarian Presidency decided to kick 2018 off with a fresh approach. They circulated questions on the most controversial articles of the reform among Member States and then seemed to be proposing a new compromise.

Weirdly enough, this proposal seems to be very close to the positions of France, Spain, and Portugal than a honest attempt at balancing between the different challenges Europe faces. Continue reading →

Is the new education exception in Germany geared towards the 21st century?

Anatomische les van professor Paaw
New law already scheduled for review
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This is a guest post by Bernd Fiedler, policy manager at Wikimedia Deutschland. Bernd previously worked as a teacher and is aiming at improving the framework for free education. WMDE is a Communia member organisation.

In the “Urheberrechts-Wissensgesellschafts-Gesetz” (engl. roughly: Copyright Knowledge-Society Act), the German legislator tries to improve the legal framework for educators and scientists in Germany, as part of a general clean-up of the exceptions section of the Copyright Code. In general, 15% of a protected work can be used for educational and scientific purposes without permission until 2023.

The law, introduced last minute at the end of the legislative period in 2017, was long overdue. It was heavily lobbied, it is limited to five years, and it is already scheduled for review. Still, as Federal Minister of Justice Heiko Maas put it, because it is bundled into a single document, it somewhat clarifies regulation for educators, coming into effect on March 1, 2018.

In Germany, legislation on education and research is fragmented due to the federal constitution. So far, with the exception of the Copyright Code, which is federal law, the state-level executive and legislative bodies have full responsibility for education in their Länder (states). This includes the details on how copyright exceptions and limitations for education are handled in practice, which is regulated very granularly in treaties between the states’ culture ministers on one side and rightsholder representatives on the other. In practice, there were 16 different ways of handling copyright in education and some federal-level treaties that had to be considered.

From March onwards, educational institutions can use up to 15% of any single work (e.g. Book, Film etc.) in order to supply their courses and staff, and use that amount even for third-party presentations, as long as this serves to present the teaching outcome or similar at the institution itself. Single images, “a few” scientific articles from the same academic journal issue, out-of-distribution works and “works of smaller proportions” can be used in their entirety.

Before, the federal law only contained vague legal terms such as “shorter extracts”, “works of smaller proportions”, the meaning of which had to be negotiated into the abovementioned treaties at state level, leading in practice to different extent limitations in each state.

Shortcomings of the new exception

Continue reading →

Open Letter challenges Portuguese Government’s position on art. 13

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Today, a group of Portuguese organizations, including an important innovation acceleration hub, software companies, free culture and users rights advocates, and the Portuguese association of librarians, archivists and documentalists, sent an open letter to the Portuguese Government asking to the Government to reconsider its position in relation to art. 13 (the proposal to require online platforms to filter all uploads by their users).

As we have noted before, Portugal is, along with France and Spain, one of the countries that supports the Commission’s plan to force online platforms to install upload filters that would prevent any uses of copyright protected not explicitly approved by rightsholders. Portugal has also been pushing forward amendments proposed by the French Government that would significantly change the way online platforms operate. Under the rules proposed by the French, operating open platforms would only be possible with permission from rights holders.

Portugal can still make it right!

The signatories of the letter acknowledge the negative impact that such proposals would have on the fundamental rights of the Portuguese citizens and on the booming Portuguese ecosystem of startups and entrepreneurs, which is as important to the Portuguese economy as the tourism industry. They, thus, ask to the Portuguese Government to depart from its initial position, which privileges the interests of a small class of commercial copyright holders, and to embrace the future of digital innovation instead.

This open letter is yet another reminder that copyright policy cannot be based on the interests of commercial rightsholders alone and a reminder that it is important to challenge the positions of national governments on this important issue (see this helpful overview by MEP Julia Reda for other governments that need to be reminded that we need copyright rules that embrace the future instead of the past).