Reading List: Art. 17 implementation

Reading list: Jasmin Brieske & Alexander Peukert, Coming into Force, not Coming into Effect? The Impact of the German Implementation of Art. 17 CDSM Directive on Selected Online Platforms, CREATe Working Paper 2022/1
Will Germany’s user protections prove to be a “paper tiger”? This very interesting paper suggests some risks in that direction. Abstract:

Germany transposed Art. 17 Directive 2019/790 on copyright and related rights in the Digital Single Market (CDSMD) with a new Act on the Copyright Liability of Online Content Sharing Service Providers (OCSSP Act), which entered into force on 1 August 2021. After a brief summary of the state of debate on the EU level regarding Art. 17 CDSMD and of the German OCSSP Act, this paper examines whether the terms and conditions and other publicly accessible copyright policies of eight services, namely YouTube, Rumble, TikTok, Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, SoundCloud and Pinterest, changed upon the coming into force of the German OCSSP Act. For this purpose, we reviewed and analyzed the relevant German-language websites four times between July 2021 and November 2021. Our data collection revealed only few changes in the terms and conditions of platforms over time but significant differences between the services in relation to their use of content recognition technology. The concluding section discusses the implications of these findings for the future of copyright policy in the EU.