On 14 May the ancillary copyright for publishers got promulgated in the Federal Law gazette and will enter into force on 1 August 2013 in Germany. According to the law, a press publisher has the exclusive right to make press material available, in whole or in part, for commercial purposes, unless it concerns only single words or small text extracts. However, making the press material publicly available is not entirely covered: only that which is undertaken by commercial search engine providers or providers of commercial services that process the content accordingly is covered.
For several years the German Association of Magazine Publishers, VDZ, has underlined that the adoption of such a law is indispensable to ensure that publishers themselves can decide on how their content is used by third parties. The adoption of the ancillary right for press publishers has therefore closed a legal loophole. Even if the text adopted does not consider all the ideas of publishers, the new intellectual property right for press publishers is an important element of a fair legal framework for the digital world.
The law will allow publishers to determine themselves if and under which conditions their content can be used by search engines and aggregators for commercial purposes. An automatic right of use is not connected to the system adopted. Rather, it is up to the publishers to make the business decision whether to agree with search engines and aggregators who wish to use the contents for commercial purposes. The adoption of the ancillary copyright is, therefore, an important signal that underlines the value of journalistic content and the free press.
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