Experts from several parliamentary groups gave a first outlook on the upcoming parliamentary discussion on the controversial copyright amendment on Monday. In principle, everyone was in agreement with Martin Rabanus, spokesman for culture and media for the SPD. According to him, politicians must find a clever interaction between the various instruments such as extended license models, intelligent barriers and “pre-flagging” in order to preserve user rights.

“Of course we don’t want an exaggerated instrument of censorship,” assured Rabanus at an online conference of the Copyright Initiative, which is close to collecting societies. Freedom of expression on the Internet should not be harmed, but artists should also have their monetary rights. A “sporting coordination process between the departments involved” is currently taking place along with the Federal Ministry of Justice’s draft bill for the implementation of the EU copyright directive.

At the same time, Rabanus reminded that Schwarz-Rot had already agreed in the coalition agreement to exclude upload filters and at the same time to strengthen the position of rights holders and creatives. In the final phase of the negotiations on the EU guidelines, the disputes were then “madly heated up” in parliament. In order to get the guideline “over the cliff” at all, the protocol declaration of the federal government was important. This states that upload filters should be prevented “if possible” and should be made “largely unnecessary”.

It does not work without an upload filter “The fear that the censorship monster will censor away as much as possible is nonsense,” says Rabanus a year and a half later. The declaration was made in a “hysterical situation”. At the moment the debate is more factual, but there is a risk of falling back into the trenches. For the political scientist it is certain that the directive can hardly be implemented without the “technical aids” called upload filters. The 48 – year-old added: “Of course, that’s the only way in the digital world.” Ansgar Heveling from the CDU / CSU parliamentary group agreed with his coalition colleague that the protocol note was created “in a multiple pressure environment” including large demonstrations . On the other hand, it was still comparatively balanced. At the moment the crucial question is whether the cascade of tools brought into play by the Ministry of Justice is properly balanced. This rightly begins with the question of licensing and ends with new exceptions to the exclusive right of exploitation.

Minor barriers Also The legal politician believes that the aim of the proposed “minor barrier”, with which snippets of content such as memes in social media should be royalty-free and subject to compensation, is correct. The set amounts of excerpts from protected works could be too large: “1000 Characters per text are quite a lot.” This is anything but a “minor question”. Above all, the CDU-led Federal Ministry of Economics rejects the blanket exception, even though the Christian Democrats had advocated precisely this approach last year of the Greens, Tabea Rößner. In its statement, the government expressed “legitimate concerns”. The Ministry of Economic Affairs shouldn’t be on the brakes here. On the other hand, politicians have to include the big platforms in regulation, “which make a lot of money by using third-party content”. In addition, the work of the legislature is under the sword of Damocles that the European Court of Justice could collect articles 17 on upload filters in response to an action by Poland. However, the judgment is only expected after the implementation period, which ends in June.

The Berlin legal scholar Axel Metzger described the de minimis barrier as an opportunity to pacify the various interest groups and to find a workable compromise. Currently, the copyright law has acceptance problems “among the generation of YouTube users”, for which in the end the creative minds paid the price. The proposed mechanism, which reminds of the existing rules for private copying, is well compatible with social media. The fact that it is not specified in the directive does not have to be an obstacle.

Remuneration claims and blocking The planned The professor of intellectual property law can also understand the direct remuneration claim of the authors, whereby money from the conclusion of contracts with platforms should not remain with the right holders alone. Otherwise the exploiters could take the point of view that the creatives have already been rewarded. With the pre-flagging the user rights would also be strengthened, even if the assumption of the “role of an arbitrator” for smaller service providers is likely to be complicated according to the existing notice-and-takedown procedure. What is new is that the right holder has to provide the necessary information. Even the lawyer left no doubt about it: “In the end it will only be possible via the upload filter”, even if the word is not in the draft. Platforms such as YouTube are already filtering today, so that such activities would take place in the future at least in a “codified framework” and possibly “not all nightmares will materialize”.

(olb)