United within CISAC, collecting societies for visual arts have failed to oblige image search engines to pay for the visual content indexed by their crawlers. This obligation was provided in Article 13 b) voted in the European Parliament in September 2018 and later dropped in the Trilogue.
During the negotiations, CEPIC supported Art.13 b) (The Importance of Art 13 b) Final) as long as multiple licensing solutions are provided for.
Hyperlinks have been excluded from copyright protection by EU jurisprudence and by the EU copyright directive.
This means that high-res images displayed linked from a source Website to be displayed on a third-party websites will not be covered by copyright. This leads to the absurd situation that the same picture will be protected by copyright if it's up-loaded but not if it's embedded or linked.
In spite of the EU copyright directive adopted in April 2019 and draft Regulation on monitoring terrorist content, the review of the E-Commerce Directive governing the liabilty of platforms seems to unavoidable in the present mandature of the new elected European Parliament.
Major stakeholders have therefore started publishing their views:
Google: "We’ve previously shared our experiences in order to promote smart regulation in areas like privacy, artificial intelligence, and government surveillance, and I recently wrote about specific legal frameworks for combating illegal content online. In that spirit, we are offering some ideas for approaching oversight of content-sharing platforms." Read more here …
EDRI (Digital Rights NGO) "The upcoming reform can therefore be both a chance and a potential trap for policy-makers." Read more here …
According to Politico, tech lobby CCIAE Europe has called for 'update' of e-commerce directive asking that : 1) Liability protection regime and prohibition of general monitoring obligations be maintained 2) A new “Good Samaritan” principle should be added.
Sports organisations have failed to have an "Art.12 a)" in the EU Copyright Directive. The proposal for Article 12a provided that only the organiser of a sports event would have have the right to reproduce and make available footage of its events. Sports organisations see this legal provision as an enforcement tool to fight piracy online.
In the new mandature sports organisations remain determined to get a new 'neighbouring right'. This will be opposed by press picture agencies and by the New Media Coalition, of which Getty images is a member.