Letter to the EU Ambassadors on Article 11 co-signed by consumer organisations and the European innovative media publishers

Today, 17 January, we, the Coalition of European Innovative Media Publishers together with 5 consumer associations (Asociación de Usuarios de Internet, Asociación de internautas, Unione Nazionale Consumatori, Asociación de Consumidores y Usuarios Digitales de España and Federacja Konsumentów), sent a letter to the Member States representatives with our concerns on Article 11 of the Copyright Directive.

EU Ambassadors will meet this Friday, 18 January, to discuss the final outline of Article 11 and we urge them to listen to our concerns both from the media publishers and the consumers sectors.

We believe that the introduction of a EU-wide neighbouring right, will make it harder for small and local media outlets to grow and reach new audiences as well as inevitably lead to reduced diversity of news sources for European citizens. It will affect the ability of European users to share, comment and discuss news online. This is particularly worrisome at a time where European citizens intensively rely on online services to access information. For these reasons, small and local publishers and consumer association groups around Europe are calling the European institutions to strike a fair balance that will satisfy all stakeholders.

We urge policy-makers to:

1. Ensure media pluralism by protecting the business model of small and local publishers: All publishers should be entitled to decide whether they wish to claim the new right or whether it is in their interest to provide their content for free.
2. Not introduce a “link tax”: Make sure that all hyperlinks are excluded from the application of the new publisher’s right.
3. Protect the right of European citizens to access relevant information by excluding from the scope of the publisher’s right individual words, short excerpts (snippets) and headlines which provide context to the hyperlinks and provide necessary and contextual information to users.
4. Make sure that the new publisher’s right doesn’t apply to mere facts, as they shouldn’t be covered by copyright, but only covers extracts that are the expression of the intellectual creation of their authors.

Read our letter here.

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Innovative Media Publishers Coalition