On 26 March 2019 the EU Parliament voted to pass the draft Copyright Directive (“Directive”) into EU law.  After adoption by the EU Council (representatives of Member State governments) and official publication, the EP’s adopted text will become EU law. Member States will then have until mid-2021 to implement it into their national laws. DSM Watch has already overviewed the whole Directive here, and looked at Article 11 on a new press publishers’ right (re-numbered Article…

Yesterday (26 March 2019) the EU Parliament voted to pass the draft Copyright Directive into EU law.  After adoption by the EU Council (representatives of Member State governments) and official publication, the EP’s adopted text will become EU law. Member States will then have until mid-2021 to implement it into their national laws. DSM Watch has already overviewed the whole Directive here, and looked at Article 13 on liability of user-uploaded content services (re-numbered Article…

Today the EU Parliament voted to pass the draft Copyright Directive into EU law.  After adoption by the EU Council (representatives of Member State governments) and official publication, it will become EU law.   Member States will then have until mid-2021 to implement it into their national laws.   Despite substantial opposition from blocks of MEPs and the large numbers of the general public, the final text does include the controversial press publishers’ right (Article 11) and content…

Agreement on a compromise text for the new Copyright Directive was reached between Member State government representatives, EU Parliament representatives and the EU Commission last week (see our “Breakthrough” post). On 20 February 2019, EU Governments formally voted, by a majority, to approve that compromise text: Italy, Poland, Luxembourg, the Netherlands and Finland opposed it; Belgium and Slovenia abstained.   However, it is not yet law despite some headlines which one may see in the…

In a nutshell: As part of the DSM strategy, the Commission has recently published a series of new proposals impacting platforms and ISPs, including a Recommendation on tackling illegal content online and a draft Regulation on promoting fairness and transparency for business users of e-commerce platforms. In these new documents, the Commission addresses consumer protection, fair competition and notice-and-take-down obligations. We highlight the main possible changes below. Last Thursday (26 April 2018) the EU Commission…

On Tuesday 14 November the Hogan Lovells DSM Taskforce (our dedicated pan-EU team of lawyers tracking the Commission’s DSM strategy) had its annual live meeting in Brussels to discuss the progress of the implementation of the DSM strategy and key forthcoming developments. The team held a webinar on the status of the strategy and what to expect in 2018 in the areas of platforms, e-commerce, the draft AVMS Directive, the copyright reforms, privacy and telecoms.…

On 25th of May the European Commission published the draft for the amended Audiovisual Media Services Directive (AVMS Directive), which regulates broadcasting and on-demand audiovisual media services in Europe. The Commission’s draft extends the scope of audiovisual regulation to cover new online services. Regulation of internet video channels Currently the AVMS Directive only covers content that is comparable “to the form and content of television broadcasting” due to the definition of “programme” in the Directive.…