The member states are about to reach a political agreement of principle on copyright reform.
On Friday 27 April, the Committee of Permanent Representatives to the EU (Coreper) will be invited to give their views on a draft compromise prepared by the Bulgarian Presidency of the Council of the EU. Compared to recent castings, Sofia is proposing to restrict the new neighbouring law for newspaper publishers to just one year (see EUROPE 11990).
It should be recalled that the draft directive presented in September 2016 introduces further exceptions to copyright rules and sets out new provisions to ensure better protection of protected content.
At this stage, neither the Parliament nor the Council have reached their respective positions. The legal affairs Parliamentary committee vote was postponed for the first time in March, then for a second time in April and is now planned for June (see EUROPE 11999).
At the Council, however, things appear to be going more quickly: Coreper could possibly support the text prepared by the Bulgarian Presidency on Friday 27 April. The latter is drawing from all the discussions that have taken place at a Coreper level over the past year and a half. It is also deciding on the last questions pending, namely:
Neighbouring law (Article 11). The text includes the highly controversial idea of a neighbouring law for newspaper publishes based on a criterion of originality, similarly to what already exists in the film industry and the music and audiovisual sectors. On the other hand, it rejects the idea of introducing a size criterion, as called for by certain member states.
The main change involves the question of how long this law is valid for. The Commission said that it should be valid for 20 years and the Bulgarian Presidency suggests limiting it to just one year.
Value gap (Article 13). The Bulgarian Presidency is drawing from the Commission’s approach to reduce the value gap or disparity between the benefits made by the platforms from protected content and what the creatives actually receive. It is suggesting an improved framework for the activity of the platforms that communicate to the public by obliging them to conclude licenses with the rights holders, whilst removing the envisaged “criterion of knowledge”.
It also suggests applying the limited liability system - included in the e-Commerce directive - to providers that: 1) introduce effective and proportionate measures to prevent the availability of unauthorised content; the proportionate nature will be assessed in relation to the scale of the services; and 2) include a reporting and withdrawal of unauthorised contents mechanism known as the 'notice and stay-down obligation'.
Exceptions for text and data mining (article 3). The draft text ultimately maintains an exception or limitation to the copyright rules for text and data mining carried out in the research domain and also adds a similar optional provision for other areas (article 3a). It did not provide a follow-up to the request made by seven member states to limit this exception to temporary copies of free materials.
Collective license mechanism. For the remaining questions, the compromise text introduces a new collective license mechanism “with extended effect” (article 9a) under which the member states would be able to decide whether the rights holders that are not represented by collective management bodies are covered on their territory by the licensing agreements that these companies have concluded.
Please see the following link for the compromise text: https://bit.ly/2HVkQfA (Original version in French by Sophie Petitjean)