The Directive still has to be approved by Member States
This week the EU adopted the legislation, which will change the internet as we know it. But all is not lost. First, the Directive on copyright in the Digital Single Market must be approved by the Council, where the votes of the representatives are weighted according to the population of the member states (the bigger the population of a member state, the more the vote counts). There is still a theoretical chance for a major state to reject the Directive.
© EFF (Electronic Frontier Foundation)
Some place their hopes with Germany, where the political party CDU, ironically the same political party that rapporteur of the European Parliament Axel Voss belongs to, has already announced that it will strive for Germany not to implement upload filters. However, this seems unlikely and additionally complicated due to some alleged political plots.
Slovenia did not give approval to the Directive in February. Should the directive pass in the Council, it will have to be implemented into Slovenian legislation by spring 2021. This means that the Slovene Copyright and Related Rights Act will have to be amended and supplemented according to the regulation set forth in the Directive. The provisions of the Directive allow for some manoeuvring space, which can yet be utilized not only to benefit rightsholders and tech companies but to also consider the interests of creators and internet users.
According to EFF, the most problematic articles could also come under the scrutiny of the CJEU. The problematic Article 13 (now 17) must comply with previous provisions of the E-Commerce Directive, which prohibits proactive prior content control, also through general content filtering, as already established by Court of Justice of the EU.
The French government has a new plan for Europe that could help the EU compete with the US tech giants: the digital commons.
The International Association of Library Associations and Institutions (IFLA), PAC Centre for digital preservation, hosted at the National Library of Poland is holding a series of 10 webinars on basic understanding of digitisation projects.
Communia, a non-governmental organisation that advocates for policies that expand the public domain and increase access to and reuse of culture and knowledge, issued twenty new copyright policy recommendations for the next decade.
The DSM Directive entered into force in June 2019 and the deadline for implementation expired on 7 June 2021. On 23 June 2021, the Commission launched multiple infringement procedures and sent letters of formal notice to Slovenia and 22 other Member States that had failed to notify it of the full transposition of the Directive. Slovenia remains among the 14 Member States against which the Commission is continuing the infringement procedure. On 19 May 2022, the Commission sent reasoned opinions to Belgium, Bulgaria, Cyprus, Denmark, Greece, France, Latvia, Poland, Portugal, Slovenia, Slovakia, Finland and Sweden.