On 21st October 2021, Facebook announced that it has reached an agreement with APIG, an association of French press publishers, committing itself to the payment of licensing fees pursuant to the press publishers’ right introduced by the 2019 Copyright Directive. According to Facebook’s press release, the agreement “means that people on Facebook will be able…

This blog looks at Article 15 of the (Directive on Copyright in the Single Digital Market (CDSM Directive), the press publishers’ right. Article 15, as regular readers of this blog will recall from this, and this, and this, and this post, creates a right ancillary to copyright that benefits some publishers. It is triggered when…

This blog looks at Article 15 of the (Directive on Copyright in the Single Digital Market (CDSM Directive), the press publishers’ right. Article 15, as regular readers of this blog will recall from this, and this, and this, and this post, creates a right ancillary to copyright that benefits some publishers. It is triggered when…

As reported in a previous blog post, the Australian government has been intensively negotiating the Australian version of the press publishers’ right, the News Media Bargaining Code. The legislation was initially proposed in July 2020 and, following tough negotiations with industry stakeholders, the slightly amended News Media Bargaining Code was eventually passed by the Australian…

Could copyright put an end to the challenges the news industry faces while it tries to manage its position on the Internet? This question lay at the heart of the conference “Copyright, Related Rights and the news”, organised by the Institute for Information Law in collaboration with CIPIL on April 23, 2016. Threats faced by…

The European Commission keeps sending us surprises. After December’s Communication on Modernizing Copyright, which contained a mixed bag of copyright goodies, we had expected just about anything but the announcement that followed on March 23rd. The European Commission has launched a public open consultation on ‘the possible extension’ of neighbouring rights to publishers. As we…

On December 16, search engine giant Google started excluding stories from Spanish news media on its Google News service. The Californian internet company has taken the decision in the wake of the so-called ‘Google tax’, which forms part of the Spanish government’s new Copyright Act, due to go into force on January 1, 2015. The…

“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…

“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…

On the first week of January, media and blogs extensively reported about a Slovak ruling of the Regional Court in Bratislava, which denied copyright protection on newspaper articles. In fact, the court assessed only three articles submitted as evidence, and of course, did not deny copyright protection in general. On the other hand, it quite…