Europe, towards a change in the Internet copyright paradigm

[vc_row] [vc_column] [vc_column_text] On September 12, the European Parliament approved the Proposal for a Directive on copyright in the Digital Single Market, after modifying the initial proposal, which was rejected in July. However, it still has to be supported by the Council and the Commission so that, once they reach a consensus, the European Parliament approves the final wording of the measure, in a vote that is estimated to take place next January. If this community directive is finally approved, the different aggregators of internet content - that is, platforms where news links or any type of content are collected from a multitude of different sources, such as YouTube - will have to change their business model, because articles as the 11th and 13th represent a radical change to current legislation. Thus, article 11 is addressed to the media, giving press publishers the power over whether their news can be fully or partially disseminated on other digital platforms or, even, charge a fee for the digital use of their content. But article 13 is the most controversial, since it states that online platforms must be the ones that”they shall adopt, in cooperation with rights holders, appropriate measures to ensure the proper functioning of agreements concluded with rights holders for the use of their works or other services or to prevent works or other benefits identified by rights holders from being available in their services in cooperation with service providers” .This article puts in jeopardy the big technology companies that have already cried out in the sky, as they become responsible for copyright infringement. Until now, only when they were warned that these rights were being violated and not acting accordingly, were they responsible. On the other hand, it is now intended that they be proactive in ensuring that content is not uploaded to their respective platform without the corresponding authorization and, if so, to obtain it from their owners and pay these authors if their work is finally reproduced. At first glance, the first thing that crosses our minds is that viewing platforms in streaming or downloading content is going to make it even more difficult, which I personally find necessary because violating the intellectual property rights of their owners is detrimental to our culture, since it prevents these authors from being able to sustain their creations, and therefore, to stop creating. However, these measures will also make it quite difficult to use the Internet as we were used to because, to give you an idea, they can even affect memes that use protected images. This future regulation is aimed at the management of the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU), because let's remember the important and recent Judgment in Case C-161/17 of last August 7, where the CJEU strengthened the copyright of photographs on the Internet. In that judgment, he stated that”without prejudice to the exceptions and limitations provided exhaustively in the Directive, it must be considered that any use of a work by a third party without the author's prior consent violates the author's rights” well”the publication, on an Internet site, of a photograph previously published on another Internet site —after having been copied, between those two publications, on a private server—must be described as 'making available' and, therefore, an 'act of communication' ”, since”the publication of a copyrighted work on an Internet site other than the one where the initial communication was made with the authorization of the copyright holder must be qualified as making that work available to a new audience”.

Georgina García-Más (T&l Attorney)

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