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 News From You
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Week ending March 2, 2013
The European Publishers Council (EPC) welcomes today’s decision by the German Bundestag to approve an ancillary copyright for news publishers in law that means that search engines and other aggregators who commercialise publishers’ content will no longer be able to do so without permission. The "Leistungsschutzrecht," as it is know in German, will pave the way for commercial negotiations between the parties on the price for the commercial use of publishers' content.
EPC Chairman and CEO of Impresa in Portugal, Francisco Pinto Balsemão, said: “The EPC welcomes this important vote in the German Bundestag today which recognises clearly in copyright law both the value and the cost of investment in professional journalistic content."
The new law will only apply to those companies who exploit commercially third party content such as content aggregators and search engines. The proposed provision signifies no change at all to possible uses by other users, or for consumers, bloggers or companies and associations who may use links or cite passages of published content.
News publishers can now demand that search engines and other providers of such services that aggregate their content, refrain from unauthorised forms of usage. These companies will need licences for such usage in the future.
The EPC believes that this law will help establish a market for aggregator content. New innovative business models can now be built based on legally licensed content.
Meanwhile the EPC is actively working on creating the technical infrastructure that will facilitate the communication of online digital rights. Its project, the Linked Content Coalition, has devised a new Rights Reference Model (RRM), due to be published for comment over the next few weeks. The RRM brings together for the first time all the different licensing models and languages for all kinds of content: text, images, video, music, for example. This project seeks to solve the problem and address the criticism that it is often difficult to work out how to use online content legally – for individuals, businesses and for automated tools.
EPC’s Executive Director, Angela Mills Wade said: “With the right legal conditions and the technical tools provided by the Linked Content Coalition, it will be easy to access and use content legally. This will mean that publishers will have the incentive to continue to populate the internet with high-quality, authoritative, diverse content and to support new, innovative business models for online content.”
The World Association of Newspapers and News Publishers (WAN-IFRA) and the World Editors Forum have called on the newly appointed US Secretary of State, John Kerry, to raise press freedom concerns with Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan during Mr Kerry’s visit to Turkey on Friday.
In a letter to Secretary Kerry, WAN-IFRA, the global organisation of the world’s newspapers and news publishers, highlighted the plight of jailed journalists in Turkey and called for greater press freedoms and the end to the use of criminal charges to punish journalists simply for doing their jobs.
Turkey has more journalists in its jails than any other country in the world.
“Turkey’s position as the world’s largest jailer of journalists is simply unacceptable,” said the WAN-IFRA letter. “A country so often hailed as the democratic example for the aspirations of an entire region, one with such a history-rich and high caliber press, cannot condone the imprisonment of journalists.”
Turkey denies jailing journalists and often instead claims they are ‘terrorists’. The international community has firmly rejected this contention.
Evidence published in an October 2012 report by the New York-based Committee to Protect Journalists suggests authorities “have conflated the expression of political views the government finds offensive with outright terrorism.” There are at least 49 journalists in Turkish jails, according to the CPJ report.
Turkey’s restrictive legal environment, and its sweeping national security measures and anti-terrorism legislation, are frequently deployed against journalists to silence critical voices.
Having written to Turkish authorities over a range of issues in recent years, WAN-IFRA is urging Secretary Kerry to raise the issue of press freedom and “to seek the freedom of all journalists imprisoned for their writing as a matter of urgency.”
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