“Yet, in contrast to the legislative measures that had been previously contemplated, this deal is only of a stand-alone character and will not affect the situation of smaller aggregators.”

A while back we reported on the clash between search giant Google and media organisations in, among other countries, France over the former’s news aggregating service Google News. French publishing associations have been demanding the introduction of a ‘snippeting right’ in France which would oblige content aggregators to obtain a license, and thus share revenue, for the privilege of display links to their articles. The underlying idea is that those who profit from the distribution of content sho [...]

“According to the current formulation of the draft law, material quoted by humans for commentary and analysis, as opposed to that automatically selected by a computer, may be copied freely.”

The link wars have once again broken out in Europe. In August, the German cabinet gave its backing to a draft law allowing news publishers to collect compensation for the republication of headlines and the introductory sentences of articles by aggregators and search engines. Under the proposal, which would protect content for one year, news publishers would be able to license out snippeting rights for a royalty and start proceedings against those found to infringe their newfound neighbouring right. T [...]

In the course of the implementation of the European telecommunications package, a set of proposals has been introduced to the Dutch Telecommunications Law (Telecommunicatiewet) to safeguard an open and secure internet for the Netherlands. The proposals include a net neutrality provision (Articles 7.4a and VIb of the draft amendment), an anti-wiretapping provision (Article 11.2a of the draft amendment) and an internet connection provision (Article 7.6a of the draft amendment). A broad majority in the Dutch parliament (Tweede Kamer) voted in favour of the amendments last June. The proposals will also have to be adopted by the Dutch Senate (Eerste Kamer) before entering into force. The vote bef [...]

On the 28 of October the European Commission adopted a Recommendation on the digitisation and online accessibility of cultural material and digital preservation. The Recommendation follows up on a similar Recommendation from 2006, updating for new developments such as the launch in 2008 of Europeana and the adoption of the Commission’s proposal for a Directive on orphan works in May 2011. The Recommendation acknowledges the importance of digitisation for making Europe’s cultural productions more widely available and thereby boosting the growth of Europe’s creative industries. It accordingly challenges Member States to step up their digitisation efforts.

On an organisational level, the [...]