Month: September 2018

European Parliament approves the DSM Copyright Directive Proposal

IPlens1 Comment

In yesterday’s session, the European Parliament approved the proposed Directive on Copyright in the Digital Single Market [see our previous comments here, here, and a more detailed position paper, here]. MEPs voted 438-226 with 39 abstentions.

Here is the text passed – a compromise solution that slightly changes from the previous version rejected by the European Parliament back in July.

Among the most controversial provisions:

  • the text and data mining (TDM) exception has been confirmed in its original structure (limited to research organizations). The new version adds an optional additional TDM exception (Article 3a) that applies in favor of lawful users except such TDM usage has been expressly reserved by the right holder.
  • the ancillary right for press publishers (art. 11) has been slightly amended:

1. Member States shall provide publishers of press publications with the rights provided for in Article 2 and Article 3(2) of Directive 2001/29/EC so that they may obtain fair and proportionate remuneration for the digital use of  their press publications by information society service providers.

1a. The rights referred to in paragraph 1 shall not prevent legitimate private and non-commercial use of press publications by individual users.

[…]

2a. The rights referred to in paragraph 1 shall not extend to mere hyperlinks which are accompanied by individual words.

4. The rights referred to in paragraph 1 shall expire 5 years after the publication of the press publication. This term shall be calculated from the first day of January of the year following the date of publication. The right referred to in paragraph 1 shall not apply with retroactive effect.

Recital 33 specifies that “the protection shall also not extend to factual information which is reported in journalistic articles from a press publication and will therefore not prevent anyone from reporting such factual information”. This seems a bit in contrast with the provision of 2a that allows reporting only “individual words”.

  • As regards article 13, filtering obligations have been only apparently removed, since in case right holders are not happy to license their contents, UGC platforms shall cooperate to block such contents

1. Without prejudice to Article 3(1) and (2) of Directive 2001/29/EC, online content sharing service providers perform an act of communication to the public.  They shall therefore conclude fair and appropriate licensing agreements with right holders.

2. Licensing agreements which are concluded by online content sharing service providers with right holders for the acts of communication referred to in paragraph 1, shall cover the liability for works uploaded by the users of such online content sharing services in line with the terms and conditions set out in the licensing agreement, provided that such users do not act for commercial purposes.

2a. Member States shall provide that where right holders do not wish to conclude licensing agreements, online content sharing service providers and right holders shall cooperate in good faith in order to ensure that unauthorised protected works or other subject matter are not available on their services. Cooperation between online content service providers and right holders shall not lead to preventing the availability of non-infringing works or other protected subject matter, including those covered by an exception or limitation to copyright. […]

Article 2(4b) sets out a very complex definition of the UGC platforms affected, taking into account the CJEU case law: “‘online content sharing service provider’ means a provider of an information society service one of the main purposes of which is to store and give access to the public to a significant amount of copyright protected works or other protected subject-matter uploaded by its users, which the service optimises and promotes for profit making purposes“. Recital 37a adds that this is “including amongst others displaying, tagging, curating, sequencing, the uploaded works or other subject-matter, irrespective of the means used therefor, and therefore act in an active way.” It then excludes from the definition of online content sharing service providers microenterprises and small sized enterprises, as well as service non-commercial providers such as online encyclopaedia or providers of online services where the content is uploaded with the authorisation of all right holders concerned, such as educational or scientific repositories.

Article 12a protecting sport event organizers has been introduced at a later stage (with no impact assessment).

This compromized version shows some slight improvements, despite the original defects of the Proposal still remain unsolved. Now the trilogue negotiations amongst the Parliament, the Council and the Commission will start.

Francesco Banterle

 

On the German Supreme Court’s ruling on linking

IPlens1 Comment

On December 2017, the German Supreme Court (Bundersgerichtshof, hereinafter “BGH”) released the motivations on which it grounded its decision of 21 September 2017 (available here) on the classification of “linking” as an act of communication to the public.

In the German proceedings, the defendant was the owner of a website incorporating a search engine function which completely relied on Google’s search engine. It resulted that four images, made available in a password-protected section on plaintiff’s websites only to paying users, were made illicitly accessible on the free internet and appeared also as results of the researches launched on defendant’s website.

Following a cease and desist letter, the defendant complied with plaintiff’s request to prevent users from visualizing  the previews of the images under discussion, hindering the connection between the search criterion and those pictures. Later on, however, the plaintiff discovered that other copyright protected images were made available on the very same search engine tool and decided to sue the website’s owner.

In its decision, the German Supreme Court affirmed that an “act of public communication” occurs when a protected work is reproduced using a technical procedure that differs from the one used so far or – otherwise – is reproduced for a new audience. In the present case, even if the images were shared by the same technical procedure (the internet), the defendant’s search process referred to an audience different from the one intended by the plaintiff, as the search was carried out by an indeterminate number of internet users, whereas the images were made available by the plaintiff only to paying users, in a password-protected section of the website.

Given the above, in order to determine the defendant’s liability for such communication to the public, the German Supreme Court followed the reasoning of the CJEU in the Svenssson case and GS Media cases (respectively, C‑466/12 and C-160/15) and tried to determine if the defendant made available the images for profit and if it could have been aware of the fact that the copyright’s owner did not gave his consent to the sharing of the pictures.

The conclusions of the German Court can be summarized as follows:

  • the Judges did not share the arguments on which the CJEU based the decisions above quoted, deeming that in those cases too broad relevance had been given to the financial gain element in order to assess whether the infringement occurred. According to the BGH, to connect the existence of a scope of profit with the knowledge that hyperlinks have been published without copyright holder’s permission amounts to a misleading presumption.
  • the results of a search engine are collected by the tool through the application of an algorithm that select the content in an automatized manner. Therefore, other than in the cases analyzed by the CJEU, the search engine provider does not have manual and/or direct control on the results displayed.
  • according to the Court, the provider of a search engine cannot reasonably be expected to ascertain whether the images of works or photographs found by the search programs have been lawfully posted on the internet before reproducing those images. Linking a photograph provided on a third-party website to another website by means of an electronic link does not constitute a copyright exploitation of public access as only the operator of the external website, who uploaded the photo to the internet – and not the search engine tool provider – can decide whether it remains accessible to the public.
  • A duty of the search provider to investigate the legality of the publication of the images found by search engines before their display is contrary to the task and mode of operation of the search engines themselves.
  • The Court concluded asserting that there is no doubt, on the basis of the assessment criteria established by the CJEU, that a public reproduction by the provider of a search engine tool, of works protected by copyright within the meaning of Article 3 (1) of InfoSoc Directive, exists only if the copyright holder has not permitted the publication of the works on the open internet and it is clear that the provider of the search function was aware of this or could reasonably have been. Moreover, as hinted, other than in the quoted CJEU decisions, the BGH does not automatically connect the awareness (or the reasonable awareness) of the illicit communication to the presence of a financial gain.

The decision of the BGH not only provides with a broader interpretation of the application of the CJEU case law but constitutes also a milestone in the already ‘historical’ contrast between copyright owners and search engine providers on who should bear the duty (and the costs) of monitoring the internet preventing the exploitation of copyright protected material. It can be inferred that the German Judges shared the opinion also expressed by the Courts of other EU Countries confirming that it is up to the copyright holder to perform such controls and inform the search engine provider accordingly; on its side, the latter should promptly comply with the requests to eliminate the contents illicitly made available.

Miriam Loro Piana

Bundesgerichtshof (German Supreme Court), decision of 21 September 2017, I ZR 11/16