Germany’s copyright directive transposal project sides with platforms, by reducing their obligations when pirated content is downloaded. In doing so, it goes beyond the text adopted by the European institutions and makes it impossible to licence certain types of content, explained representatives of music, audiovisual, cinema, photography, publishing, of the press, sport, and cinema in a letter to the government, that we publish. The German transposal of the EU copyright directive is a very tense affair for right holders. The Directive was written in their favor, as MEP Axel Voss recently recalled at an event hosted by Gesac. He is politically close to Angela Merkel, and was rapporteur for the text in the European Parliament. But the German Ministry of Justice, in the hands not of Angela Merkel’s…
