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.
The 43rd session of the WIPO Standing Committee on Copyright and Related Rights (hereinafter SCCR) made substantial progress on the issues advocated by the A2K Coalition (Access to Knowledge Coalition), which IPI is a member of. This year’s session was the most productive on the issues of exceptions and limitations. James Love (Knowledge Ecology International), a long-time observer at WIPO, described the outcome and the impact of the public interest community as the strongest since the conclusion of the Marrakech Treaty, which brought global copyright exceptions for the benefit of the blind and visually impaired.
Today, March 17, 2023, a symposium on law in the information society is taking place in the golden lecture hall of the Faculty of Law in Ljubljana. Dr. Maja Bogataj Jančič will present copyright aspects of artificial intelligence at the symposium.
The third day of the 43rd session of the WIPO Standing Committee on Copyright and Related Rights is intended for discussion on the topic of exceptions and limitations to copyright, especially in connection with the right to research.
The 43rd session of the WIPO Standing Committee on Copyright and Related Rights (SCCR/43) is being held in Geneva from March 13 to 17, 2023. The Intellectual Property Institute has a permanent observer status at WIPO since 2022 and is also a member of the Access to Knowledge Coalition (A2K coalition).