Austria has published a new draft law
On September 2, 2021, Austria has published a new draft law, which implements DSM Directive. The draft law is in consultation till October 13, 2021. In regards to Art. 17 of the DSM Directive, Austrian draft law is a mixture of the German approach, on which IPI already reported, and Europan Commission’s Guidelines.
The Austrian proposal took up key elements first introduced in the German implementation drafts, which are the protection of minor uses from automated filters (15 seconds, 160 characters, 250kb), the ability for users to flag uploads as legitimate, and the ability for users’ organizations to act against platforms that engage in structural over-blocking.
The whole proposal is structurally similar to the German proposal, but instead of “presumption of legal use”, which is contained in German proposal, the Austrian proposal works with a prohibition of automated blocking of “small parts of works or other subject matter”.
You can follow the implementation of the DSM Directive by country here.
On 23 September 2021, AG Hogan delivered his Opinion in the C-433/20 Austro-Mechana case which concerns the exception and limitation of copyright from Article 5(2)(b) of the Directive 2001/29/EC of the European Parliament and of the Council of 22 May 2001 on the harmonisation of certain aspects of copyright and related rights in the information society (InfoSoc Directive), specifically in regards to the private copying exception. The AG suggests that the private copyright exception applies in the cloud, but a separate levy may not be payable.
Today, on the October 8th, 2021, 55 organizations signed and sent the letter to Delegations, supporting the Wikimedia Foundation’ application for observer status at World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO). The latter is a response to Chinas blocking of the Wikimedia Foundation’s bid for observer status at the WIPO for the second time after the Foundation’s initial application in 2020. The signatories of the latter, including Intellectual Property Institute (IPI), called on Delegations to do everything in their power to facilitate admission of the Wikimedia Foundation at the next series of meetings of the WIPO Assemblies, without any further delays.
On the 29th of September, 2021, UNESCO held the OER Dynamic Coalition Webinar, which highlighted the importance of harnessing Open Educational Resources (OER) to strengthen access to information in the context of the International Day for Universal Access to Information (IDUAI) 2021 celebrations. The webinar explored perspectives on regulatory frameworks related to copyright for educational materials. In this respect, dr. Maja Bogataj Jančič, LL.M., LL.M. presented a study on Remote education during the pandemic – Teachers’ Perspective conducted in seven countries.
Julia Reda (Gesellschaft für Freiheitsrechte) and Paul Keller (Open Future) have recently published a white paper, that proposes to build a public repository of Public Domain and openly licensed works, and to use Article 17 of the DSM Directive as leverage to create such a repository. The white paper was presented on Tuesday during the “Protecting Open Licenses in the EU Copyright Reform” session at the Creative Commons global summit.