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The collecting society Corint Media (formerly VG Media) is claiming 420 million euros from Google Germany for the year 2022. It is demanding 11% of the total revenues generated by the search engine provider in Germany. These revenues are to be used to remunerate press publishers for the use of their content under the ancillary copyright. Corint ignores the fact that the Copyright Arbitration Board had already clearly rejected a similarly calculated demand in 2015. Read more

French press publishers were granted their own ancillary copyright a month ago. So far, they have not been able to generate any significant income. With an antitrust complaint against Google, they now believe they can change this. A misbelief. Read more

Originally, the European Commission, the European Parliament and the European Council wanted to finalise the text of the planned Copyright Directive by the end of 2018. However, this goal was clearly missed so that negotiations were resumed last week. Read more

Before the summer break in Brussels and Strasburg had officially ended, members of the European Parliament got hit by the latest lobbying campaign by press agencies and publishers. With blatant lies and twisted truths they once again called on MEPs to support the widely discussed ancillary copyright for press publishers. Supporting arguments based on actual facts are absent just like they have been in the past. Read more

German courts have to deal with a variety of lawsuits that involve the German ancillary copyright for press publishers. But Google's design changes might bringt a sudden end. Read more

Today, the Committee for Culture and Education (CULT) in the European Parliament issued a draft opinion on the DSM directive proposal. Here, the rapporteur, French MEP Marc Joulaud (conservatives, EPP), proposes bluntly the protection (i.e. monopolisation) of even the smallest parts of press publications. He tries to disguise his proposal, however, as a step towards the user’s interests. Read more

Within the last couple of months, it has been very quiet about the Spanish link tax which aims to charge content aggregators a fee if they publish snippets of a news article. As a consequence, after this law was passed, Google News Spain, the main target of this measure, was shut down in 2014. But now the Spanish Reproduction Rights Centre (CEDRO) has initiated a new round of negotiations with several affected online services. The figures they ask for are shocking. Read more

Last week, the European People's Party (EPP) Group in the European Parliament held an event labelled "Hearing on Copyright". One of the speakers was Giuseppe Abbamonte, the Commission's director of media policy at the DG CONNECT, who said that we might all act illegally when we share articles, as reported by Chris Spillane from POLITICO. Read more

Yesterday, I was invited to speak at a public debate in the Press Club in Brussels. Main topic was the Commission’s proposal on the ancillary copyright. What I heard was a bunch of lies and a good measure of ignorance. Read more

Yesterday, the copyright arbitration board of the German Patent and Trademark Office (GPTO) released its ruling on the "tariff news publishers". The outcome: The tariff is inadequate, thus unlawful. The ancillary copyright for press publishers remains pointless. Read more