Academics Against Press Publishers’ Right: 169 European Academics Warn Against It - IVIR

Academics Against Press Publishers’ Right: 169 European Academics Warn Against It - IVIR: "Article 11 of the proposal for a Directive on Copyright in the Digital Single Market, as it currently stands following negotiations in the EU Council and Parliament, is a bad piece of legislation.

 Why?

The proposal would likely impede the free flow of information that is of vital importance to democracy. This is because it would create very broad rights of ownership in news and other information. These rights would be territorial ­­– there would be one for each Member State.

The rights would be owned by established institutional producers of news. And in each Member State, the new right would sit on top of all the other property rights that such publishers of news already enjoy: copyrights, database rights, broadcast rights and other related rights.

This proliferation of different rights for established players would make it more expensive for other people to use news content. Transaction costs would be greatly increased, as permissions would need to be sought for virtually any use. Even using the smallest part of a press publication (except perhaps for strictly private use) would mean payment would be due to an institutional news publisher.
That means, the proposal would be likely to harm journalists, photographers, citizen journalists and many other non-institutional creators and producers of news, especially the growing number of freelancers.
The people most likely to benefit would be the big established news institutions. If they should benefit, this is likely to exacerbate existing power asymmetries in media markets that already suffer from worrying levels of concentration in many Member States.
That said, it is not clear that even these big news institutions would benefit. Similar rights introduced in Germany and Spain were not effective.
The proposed right would provide no protection against ‘fake news’.

There is no sound economic case for the introduction of such a right. An additional intellectual property right would not change the fundamental problems that news institutions face. They would still have to compete with many other actors for consumer attention, advertisers and hence revenue."



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