The new copyright law in the EU (formerly Article 13, now 17), which has been viewed critically by many, has now also been given green light by the EU Council.
This means that the respective member states now have two years to implement the whole thing. We have already explained what we think of this here and here.
As the Zeit writes, Germany also voted for it and was apparently decisive for its implementation. The states Netherlands, Luxembourg, Poland, Italy, Finland and Sweden were against the new law and can be quoted in the Protocol declaration with the words:
Most notably we regret that the Directive does not strike the right balance between the protection of right holders and the interests of EU citizens and companies. It therefore risks to hinder innovation rather than promote it and to have a negative impact the competitiveness of the European Digital Single Market.
So the balance between rights holders and citizens is not maintained. Belgium, Slovenia and Estonia abstained from the vote.
The probably most relevant part of the #Protocol declaration: The Federal Government promises to interpret the definition of affected platforms as #Artikel17 only applies to platforms with market power such as YouTube or Facebook, not to discussion forums or niche offerings. pic.twitter.com/pXELqY4Pag
— Julia Reda (@Senficon) 15 April 2019
As Julia Reda of the Pirates informs, Germany has at least somewhat defused the target groups of the new law: in the aforementioned Protocol declaration it is mentioned that the new rules should only apply to large “market-powerful platforms”, i.e. not to small sites and blogs. This would at least defuse the most absurd circumstance. Experience has shown, however, that this does not mean that it will actually happen.
