The German ancillary copyright for press publishers introduced in 2013 has been overturned by the European Court of Justice (ECJ). It was not applicable because the Federal Government had not submitted the draft in advance to the European Commission, the judges on Thursday stated.
The court followed his Advocate General's assessment of December 2018 that the German ancillary copyright specifically concerned providers of information society services. In these cases, a prior notification of the Commission is foreseen under an EU directive.
The Federal Government, on the other hand, was of the opinion that ancillary copyright was not specifically aimed at information society services.
Controversy over snippets continues
The ECJ was involved in 2017 by the Berlin district court. Trigger was a process in which the collecting society VG Media requires compensation from Google. VG Media represents many press publishers in Germany.
Google refuses to pay the publishers Google News short extracts from press articles (so-called snippets) and links them to the sources. The company argues that it drives users to the publishers' website, which benefits them from rising advertising revenue.
In August 2014, several publishers within the VG Media had given a "free consent" to Google, because otherwise they would not have been presented with snippets in search results. The law states that only "single words or smallest text excerpts" should be freely used by search engines. How long a snippet can be after this formulation is still being argued.
In the meantime, the new EU Copyright Directive has launched a European ancillary copyright. However, the Federal Government has not yet made a transposition into German law; it has time until 2021 for this.
