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Paul Keller

Introduction

This document provides a high level analysis of the risks and opportunities created by the National implementations of Directive (EU) 2019/790 of the European Parliament and of the Council of 17 April 2019 on copyright and related rights in the Digital Single Market (hereafter “DSM Directive”). This Directive was adopted in april 2019 and Member States have until 6 June 2021 to implement the provisions contained in the Directive.

This analysis focuses on the provisions that are directly relevant to the education, research and cultural heritage sectors. This includes exceptions and limitations to copyright that have these institutions as beneficiaries and which are discussed in Part 1. Part 2 of the analysis focussed on two other provisions that are either relevant to public interest organisations (Article 14 on the protection of the public domain) or that have been especially controversial and are likely to have a significant impact on how the public interacts with copyrighted works online (Article 17). The final section of this document summarizes the analysis and the recommendations made throughout the analysis.

For each of the provisions discussed in this Directive a summary of the provision and its context is provided. This is followed by a list of issues where implementation by the Member states can significantly impact the scope and usefulness of the provision in question. It is important to note that this document does not provide implementation guidelines ^[1]Such guidelines are currently being worked on by a number of civil society organisations including COMMUNIA and library organisations such as IFLA, EBLIDA and LIBER., but rather identifies issues that are relevant for ensuring that implementations of the Directive provide maximum benefit to public interest organisations and the public at large.

This also means that this analysis has been authored with a specific objective in mind: to leverage the implementation of the DSM Directive to maximise the room that institutions in the education, research and cultural heritage sectors (and their users) have when operating in the digital environment. Given this objective this analysis does not limit itself to a literal transposition of the Directive, but also identifies opportunities for member states to go beyond what the Directive requires them to do.