The European Commission consulted on ‘Ancillary Copyright’ in June 2016.

This offered thousands of citizens a one-time opportunity to nip in the bud the idea of ‘ancillary copyright’ for publishers and state clearly that linking should not fall under copyright.

This part tackles “the role of publishers in the copyright value chain”. In plain English this refers to the so-called neighbouring rights, and more specifically the notion of ‘ancillary copyright’. This does two things: it creates a new privilege for publishers, which will apply to anything published in writing on the internet; and it “institutes a copyright fee to be paid by online news aggregators (such as Google News) to publishers for linking their content within their aggregation services”, which has been introduced in Germany and Spain, but rejected in countries such as France and Austria.

In the meantime the European Commission proposed an ancillary copyright on steroids. See our infographics on Article 11.