ROME. If you exploit content made by others, you have to pay for it. Even if your name is Facebook or YouTube. In order to share a news article or a video of a show or a song, the platforms will always have to ask for permission from the owner of the rights. And, at the same time, agree and pay a fee to the authors and interpreters. This establishes the legislative decree approved yesterday by the Council of Ministers, which thus transposed the European directive 2019/790 on “copyright and related rights in the digital single market”. The licenses in question also include relaunch actions by users, who in any case will not have to pay anything: the cost of sharing will be charged to the platforms.
“The basic objective is to adapt the law on copyright to the contemporary digital environment”, explained the Minister of Culture Dario Franceschini, “so as to guarantee greater protection for rights holders and, at the same time, new opportunities for the creative industry ». With these new rules, the publishers of newspapers and information sites will be able to claim “fair compensation” for the articles, photos, videos, podcasts that are conveyed by search engines and social networks. The Authority for the guarantees in communications, within 60 days of the entry into force of the decree, will adopt its own regulation on the subject, also to establish the criteria for the calculation. Taking into account, for example, the number of online consultations of the article, the years of activity and the market relevance of the publishers or the number of journalists employed. Both publishers and internet platforms will be able to request the start of negotiations to define fair compensation. And online service providers are obliged to inform the interested party of any data useful for assessing the extent of the remuneration, under penalty of a fine of up to 1% of turnover.
A delicate step, as AgCom president Giacomo Lasorella recalled in his last hearing in Parliament: «The data in question risk being an unreliable indicator if they are unilaterally produced and disseminated by the platforms themselves. Independent verification and transparency of audience survey processes are fundamental principles ». If the negotiation does not lead to an agreement within 30 days, AgCom will automatically establish the fair compensation. If, then, one of the two parties refuses the proposed amount, they can apply to the judicial authority. At that time, it will also be assessed whether search engines, social media and other web platforms are abusing their power to decide whether to enhance or hide the content on the web.
Speaking of abuses, there is a detail to keep an eye on: in the event of publication or sharing of a “very short extract”, taken from the article, the publishers are not entitled to any compensation. Provided that it is a “portion of the publication that does not dispense with the need to consult the journalistic article in its entirety”. There is therefore no quantitative criterion (such as the number of strokes), but qualitative, based on the stakes that will always be set by AgCom. An approach shared by the editors, who instead will have to negotiate the amount of compensation to be paid to the freelance journalists who wrote the articles, in any case between 2% and 5%. For the president of Fieg, Andrea Riffeser Monti, the approval of the decree is “an important result for the protection of the investments of publishing companies also in the digital ecosystem and for the rebalancing in the distribution of the value of the product, without compromising the free expression of network users ».