Implementation of the Directive in the Netherlands
Recently, the Dutch government has released the proposal of the amendment of the copyright legislation (in Dutch), with which it intends to implement the Directive on copyright and related rights in the Digital Single Market. The public has now until 2 September 2019 to comment on the proposal. Opening the public consultation in the middle of the summer implies that the Dutch legislator wants to implement the Directive as fast as possible without giving the public a real possibility to be included in the debate.
© EFF (Electronic Frontier Foundation)
The Dutch proposal in a nutshell:
– implementation of the extended collective licensing system into the national legislation,
– no changes to the public domain regulation since the government believes that the national legislation as already in line with Article 14,
– regarding the new related right for press publishers (Article 15), the proposal envisages a free reuse of a couple of words or very short fragments,
– the filtering obligation (Article 17) is especially prescribed for platforms such as YouTube and Facebook, whereas Wikipedia, GitHub and WhatsApp are explicitly excluded; the government explains that the quotation and parody exception remains untouched (how the technology will respect these two exception is another question).
The Dutch legislation intends to transpose the Directive without an in-depth public debate and mainly by simply copy-pasting the text of the Directive. The implementation in the Netherlands does not aim to bring meaningful improvement to the Directive, which results into very narrow exceptions.
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