©-LAW

... or, in alternative, to introduce an EU-wide neighbouring right for publishers Over the past few years debate has ensued at the level of EU Member States and the EU  alike on how to address declining revenues in the press publishing sector. Although this is not a new phenomenon (in some European countries  newspaper circulation has been in decline since the 1950s, in parallel with the advent of television), since 2000 newspaper advertising sales in Europe have  fallen across the board . This data is in line with what has also occurred in the US where, according to the  Pew Research Center , from 2013 to 2014 newspapers’ annual overall revenues have fallen from approximately $46m to approximately $20m. Some have indicated the internet, notably news aggregation services (ie aggregators of syndicated web content in one location, an example being Google News), as primarily responsible for this phenomenon. According to two studies by the  Iowa Un...

Adding layer after layer:  a lways a good idea? As readers will know, this blog has been following with some  passion  developments  leading to the introduction of new layers of protection - in the form of ancillary rights - over content displayed over the internet, eg through news aggregators.  Ancillary rights over news content In 2013 Germany adopted new provisions in its Copyright Act  ( sections  87f, 87g and 87h) that provide for the exclusive right of press publishers to exploit their contents commercially for one year, thus preventing search engines and news aggregators from  displaying non-irrelevant excerpts from newspaper articles without paying a fee.  As explained  here , the German initiative was aimed at recouping  some of the revenues that traditional news publishers have lost to the web. The underlying idea was that news aggregators like Google News would not really boost visits to newspaper we...