Digital Single Market Update - March 2016

Communication - 'Towards a modern, more European copyright framework'

On 9 December 2015, the European Commission published the communication 'Towards a modern, more European copyright framework', providing further guidance for the future of copyright. This largely mirrors the previous leaked proposals which we have commented on, with a commitment to ensure 'portability' of online content services by Spring 2016 and a harmonised exception to copyright infringement to benefit people with disabilities implementing the WIPO Marrakech Treaty. One specific change, however, is that the Commission will consider whether "any specific action on news aggregators is needed, including intervening on rights". In the communication itself ancillary rights are not discussed, but from the Q&A documents it can be seen that the Commission will continue to monitor national systems in order to decide whether to implement EU-wide ancillary rights over news content, as employed on a