The provisional agreement on copyright reform in the EU, reached on the evening of Wednesday 13 February by European Parliament and Council negotiators (see EUROPE 12193), is expected to be presented to Member States this week for a vote next week. On Parliament's side, the competent parliamentary committee will most certainly take a decision on 21 February, while the plenary session will take a position in March or April.
As a reminder, the informal agreement takes up the main lines of the Franco-German compromise on the most sensitive issues, namely: the value gap and the neighbouring right for newspaper publishers. It obliges platforms to enter into licensing agreements with right holders and to filter out what could not be agreed. Small start-ups will be exempt from this screening requirement.
The text also provides for a neighbouring right for newspaper publishers, with a clause stipulating that the revenues generated must be shared with journalists. These two exceptions (start-ups and short extracts) are subject to a revision clause, which will be activated within 5 years (2 years for the transposition deadline and 3 years for the clause).
On the European Parliament's side, the EPP group, of which the German rapporteur, Axel Voss, is a member, welcomed the agreement. Pirate Party MEP Julia Reda, shadow rapporteur for the Greens/EFA group, said she would encourage her group to vote against the agreement, which "does not even include the SME exemption, which was included in the European Parliament's mandate".
For European Commission Vice-President Andrus Ansip, the agreement will not end the "tensions" arising from diverging stakeholder interests, but it will "create a better environment for creators and protect users much better". For the latter, there will now be much more clarity regarding the posting of content online, he said. And to underline: "Licenses will be an obligation for platforms, not for users."
On the stakeholder side, the lines remained relatively stable. Publishers, directors, collective management bodies and film directors and scriptwriters welcomed the agreement reached between the parties.
For their part, the platforms, which only yesterday denounced the harmful effects of the proposals on the table, remained relatively discreet, with Google Europe and YouTube indicating on Twitter that they wanted to analyse the text first before reacting. The European Consumers’ Organisation (BEUC), for its part, clearly condemned the agreement, considering that it would make the current practice of Internet users more difficult than at present. (Original version in French by Sophie Petitjean)