More than two years after the transposition deadline, and with another infringement proceeding under its belt, Bulgaria is one of the last Member States to now implement the CDSM Directive. On the tail end of a political crisis that forced the country into multiple consecutive early general elections and led to a string of short-lived…

The belated Portuguese transposition of the CDSM Directive was finally published in the Portuguese Official Journal (Diário da República) on the 19th of June 2023. The approved Decree-Law 47/2023 to a large extent corresponds to a legislative project (Project 52/XV), which, in turn, was a variation of a previous project (Project 114/XIV) that failed due…

As testified by collections such as those of Trinity College’s Old Library, copying and illustrating manuscripts by hand was such a well-developed practice among members of mediaeval religious orders in Ireland that two Christian saints – Columba and Finnian – ended up having the first recorded copyright dispute in the Western world’s history. The most…

Introductory remarks The Greek legislator transposed Directive (EU) 2019/790 (CDSMD) with considerable delay, enacting L. 4996/2022 in November 2022 (ΦΕΚ Α´ 2022/24.11.2022), which amended the basic Greek Copyright Law (L. 2121/1993 on “Copyright, Related Rights and Cultural Matters”) as well as L. 4481/2017 on “Collective Management of Copyright and Related Rights” (ΦΕΚ Α’ 100/20.7.2017). Among…

Give me twenty-six soldiers of lead and I will conquer the world.   This quote is often attributed to Johannes Gutenberg, Benjamin Franklin, Karl Marx, or all of the above. Even if we cannot identify the exact author of these words, we can recognise that these three individuals all understood the power of the twenty-six…

In 2019, the EU’s Copyright in the Digital Single Market Directive (CDSMD) was adopted. This included the highly controversial Articles 15 and 17 on, respectively, the new press publishers’ right (PPR) and the new copyright liability scheme for “online content-sharing services providers” (OCSSPs). In a report published in September 2022, I undertook research into the…

  Knowledge Rights 21 (KR21) is a programme by European library and research associations IFLA, LIBER and SPARC Europe to mobilise the potential of Europe’s knowledge institutions, particularly libraries, to engage with others across the spectrum of the access to knowledge movement to build momentum towards long term copyright reform that benefits library users and…

Much has been said about the press publishers’ right, introduced by Article 15 of the Directive on Copyright in the Digital Single Market (CDSM). Aimed at ensuring remuneration for publishers when their publications are reused online by news aggregators, Article 15 grants press publishers the right of reproduction and the right of making available for…

Introduction By introducing the press publishers’ right in art. 15 of the Directive on Copyright in the Digital Single Market (CDSM), the EU legislator wanted to aid press publishers in licensing and enforcing their rights in press publications. The hope was that once press publishers are recognized as rightsholders in the EU legislation, their legal…

This post is the second instalment of an analysis of the ‘very short extracts’ (VSE) carve-out to the press publishers’ right set forth in Article 15 of the CDSM Directive. The first part examined the legal nature of the VSE rule, concluding that it ought to be qualified not as an ‘exception’, but as a…