The new EU copyright law is finally a done deal
The highly controversial reform of EU copyright law has finally been adopted. In the final vote on the legislation on Monday, a majority of EU member states approved the proposal.
This now clears the way for the reform. The EU Parliament had already given its approval. The EU countries now have around two years to transpose the new rules into national law.
After there were fierce protests against parts of the reform, especially in Germany, the German government recently emphasized that upload filters should be largely avoided during implementation. This refers to programs that recognize and sort out protected content as soon as it is uploaded to the Internet. By Sunday evening, several ministries were working on a supplementary declaration for the vote that would state this goal.
The copyright reform is intended to adapt the outdated copyright law in the EU to the digital age and secure better remuneration for authors for their content on the Internet. In mid-February, negotiators from the EU Parliament and the EU member states agreed on a compromise. The European Parliament approved the compromise at the end of March.
The approval of the EU states on Monday is now the last step so that the reform can come into force shortly. In February, the countries had already approved the reform once.
The German government also voted in favor. If Germany had abstained or voted against the project on Monday, there would not have been a sufficient majority. The Netherlands, Luxembourg, Poland, Italy, Finland and Sweden voted no. Belgium, Slovenia and Estonia abstained.
Protests against the project and in particular against Article 13, which will be called Article 17 in the final law, were particularly strong in Germany. Critics argue that platforms such as YouTube should check whether content is protected by copyright when it is uploaded.
In her opinion, this is only possible via filters, which run the risk of sorting out much more than necessary. This would be tantamount to censorship. From the point of view of the proponents, on the other hand, the aim is to force platforms that knowingly earn money with third-party content to license it fairly.
Article 11 (Article 15 in the final text), which provides for ancillary copyright for press publishers, was also controversial. According to this, news search engines such as Google News will have to pay money to publishers for displaying article excerpts in the future.
Critics see disadvantages here, especially for small publishers, who would have a weak negotiating position vis-à-vis Google. They also point to Germany, where ancillary copyright has been in place since 2013, but does not result in significant monetary payments to publishers.
Since Switzerland is not an EU member, the new EU copyright law will not apply here - in theory. This is because it is hardly likely that large international companies will develop the upload filters required by the EU but not apply them to Switzerland. Rather, it can be assumed that Switzerland will be treated like the other EU countries.
Swiss copyright law is also under revision. But at the beginning of March, the Council of States had sent the bill back to the commission responsible for it, with a mandate to review its decisions and take into account current legal developments in the EU. The Council of States committee has therefore held hearings, but has not yet made any decisions.
The reason for this is a controversial addition that the responsible commission had made: It wants to introduce a compensation regulation, similar to what the EU wants to do under the term ancillary copyright. (SDA)
