Proposed EU Neighbouring Rights For Press Publishers Detrimental To Authors, CEIPI Says

According to the Centre for International Intellectual Property Studies, the proposed European Commission copyright reform is detrimental to authors’ interests, and contrary to the objective of creating a single digital market.

CEIPI, at the University of Strasbourg law school, issued an opinion on the European Commission’s copyright reform proposal, particularly on the introduction of neighboring rights for press publishers in the European Union law. [Editor’s Note: the story headline has been changed to more narrowly reflect the opinion’s focus on neighbouring rights for press publishers.]

According to the opinion [pdf], the proposed reform [pdf] does not solve any systemic issues of the EU copyright system and would add an additional layer of 28 national rights. It also would pose further challenges related to the territoriality of rights and their fragmentation, it said.

Granting rights to “ever more actors will reduce the economic value of each right covering essentially the same economic use,” CEIPI’s opinion said. “While the Impact Assessment accompanying the Directive Proposal concludes that the ‘introduction of a related right covering digital uses of press publications is not expected to generate higher licence fees for online service providers’, it fails to assess the impact of the Directive Proposal on authors, CEIPI said. “As the ‘pie’ does not get any bigger, the authors’ share will inevitably decrease.”

The opinion explains that recent empirical evidence from national implementation of publishers’ neighbouring rights confirmed a negative impact on small publishers. However, news aggregators might have a positive effect on online news sites, they said.

Moreover, the opinion said that the proposed directive does not follow any meaningful logic of investment reward. It proposed to grant rights to any publication, “even those that do not involve any substantive investment.” For example, the opinion states, “publication of any trivial information on a ‘news website’ will be sufficient for the grant of neighbouring rights.”