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Recent developments at the CJEU give some shape to the practical implications of Article 17 of the Copyright Directive.

By Jean-Luc Juhan, Susan Kempe-Mueller, Deborah Kirk, Elva Cullen, Alex Park, Pia Sophie Sösemann, Victoria Wan, and Amy Smyth

7 June 2021 was the implementation deadline for the Copyright in the Digital Single Market Directive (EU) 2019/790 (the Copyright Directive), yet just four EU Member States (including Germany and the Netherlands) have fully transposed the Copyright Directive, whilst four others (including France and Denmark) have transposed only parts of the Copyright Directive. The delay in implementation is perhaps unsurprising given the controversial nature of certain of the Copyright Directive’s provisions, in particular Article 17.

Recent developments have started to add colour to how Article 17 may work in practice, and how it might align with the broader regulation of platform liability for infringing content. This blog post will discuss these developments and analyse the implications for platforms and rights holders.

Organisations face fines of up to 10% of annual global turnover or £18 million (whichever the greater) for failure to comply.

By Gail Crawford, Rachael Astin, Alain Traill, and Katie Henshall

On 15 December 2020, the UK government published its full response to the Online Harms White Paper consultation, which sets out final proposals for the new regulatory regime. The response confirms that companies in scope will face a range of new obligations relating to both illegal and harmful content, in addition to the threat of significant fines and other sanctions in the event of non-compliance. The proposed regulatory framework will be introduced in 2021 in the form of the Online Safety Bill.

The response comes more than a year and a half after the Home Office and the Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS) first published the Online Harms White Paper in April 2019, which proposed a new compliance and enforcement regime to tackle online harms. In February 2020, the government set out preliminary details of the proposed regulatory regime as an initial response to the white paper. For background to this consultation, see Latham’s previous blog posts (White Paper launch; government interim response).