The vote in the Legal Committee (JURI) of the European Parliament on the Report on the Directive on Copyright in the Digital Single Market has been postponed for the second time. Why and what does it mean?
There are several reasons for this postponement.
- The JURI Committee has loads of work and many other issues on their plate.
- 966 amendments were tabled. This is a lot to go through and compromise on.
- The rapporteur has changed. MEP Therese Comodini Cashia won a seat in the Maltese parlamentarian elections and MEP Axel Voss took her place.
- Some dispositions of the Directive are highly controversial and lobbied from all sides. Some of them raise tricky legal questions. These issues are on the one hand the establishment of a new publishing right online for press publishers (Art. 11) and on the other hand the monitoring obligation on online platform introudced by Art. 13. At member States level, the latest article is controversial too and has lead to another leak.
For CEPIC, the proposal put forward by the European Commission goes in the right direction. The obligations envisaged by Art. 13 would provide leverage in negotiating with online platforms, support in the fight against piracy and officialise the longstanding use of content recognition technologies.
The proposal does not close the “framing loophole” but a couple of encouraging amendments cover the indexing of images by image search engines.
