Voting in the Sejm on the Copyright Act
In a vote, the Sejm accepted all the amendments proposed by the Senate. The amendment will now go to the president.
The Senate adopted an amendment to the Copyright and Related Rights Act with amendments on Wednesday. The most important of them assumes that the mediator in potential disputes between publishers and online platforms is to be Office of Electronic Communications.
However, the first step is to establish the remuneration amicably through negotiations, and only then mediation by the UKE president. “The UKE president’s intervention will occur after the parties have unsuccessfully conducted mediation,” explained Deputy Minister of Culture Andrzej Wyrobiec at Tuesday’s session of the Senate’s Culture and Media Committee.
As he said, “it will take the form of an administrative ruling establishing the value of the remuneration or the method of its calculation”. “Publishers will be able to participate in the proceedings individually or in a group of several publishers within one proceeding” – said Wyrobiec.
He pointed out that deadlines have been set for each action taken by both the parties and the UKE. “The entire procedure, in the longest case, should not last longer than a dozen or so months,” he added.
He assured that publishers and service providers will be provided with the right to file an objection to a common court specializing in intellectual property matters. “Courts will rule in shortened terms – 18 months in the case of first instance and 12 months in the case of second instance,” he explained.
He declared that “all important issues that were not addressed during the current amendment will be on the agenda Copyright Forumthe first meeting of which is planned for September 10 this year.”
He said that invitations were sent out on Tuesday. Copyright Forum up to 80 entities with a request to present the most important topics that will be included in the work.
Amendment to the Act on Copyright and Related Rights
Amendment to the Act on Copyright and Related Rights along with amendments, the Sejm passed at the end of June. According to it, journalists and publishers have the right to seek compensation for content used by big tech. In the opinion of the community, this is only a theoretical change, because the act does not introduce mechanisms that publishers could use to seek compensation for this.
Protest of Polish media
In response to the rejection of the postulates put forward during the work on the amendment in the Sejm, the media carried out a protest on July 4 under the slogan “Politicians! Don’t kill Polish media”which was intended to draw the government’s attention to an amendment to the Copyright Act that was unfavorable for publishers of online and printed titles.
After the protest Prime Minister Donald Tusk together with the Marshal of the Senate Małgorzata Kidawa-Błońska, he invited representatives of the media to talks. The meeting took place on July 10, and its effect was the establishment of a special team, which was to work out amendments to the amendment to the copyright law that would be beneficial for journalists and publishers.
On July 11, the first session of the Senate Culture Committee took place, during which lawyers representing artists, creators, publishers and the media took the floor. On Tuesday, July 23, the Senate Culture Committee met again and accepted the amendments developed by the team of publishers and officials of the Ministry of Culture and National Heritage.
The amendment implements the EP directives into the Polish legal system. Poland is the last European Union country that has not implemented two EU directives on copyright and related rights in the digital single market. The current regulations are outdated, do not keep up with technological developments and do not cover the Internet and streaming platforms.
EP Directives
Two directives of the European Parliament and the Council of the EU, to be implemented into national law, were adopted on 17 April 2019. The first, known as the SATCAB II Directive, aims to create the conditions for wider dissemination in the Member States of television and radio programmes originating from other Member States.
The second one, called the DSM Directive, was the EU’s response to the challenges related to the development of digital technologies in the area of copyright. The regulations introduce, among others, new forms of permitted use of works, related rights and databases (mining of texts and data, reproduction for the preservation of cultural heritage collections) and significantly modify the forms already existing in EU law (use of works for the purposes of distance learning). “This directive also introduces new rules on the remuneration of creators and performers, to ensure that the remuneration due to them is fair” – it is written in the project. (PAP)
