The Luxembourg Deputies Chamber enacted a new bill on March 30, 2022, aimed to implement into Luxembourg law the Directive 2019/790 on copyright and related rights in the Digital Single Market (“New Copyright Directive”), which was adopted on April 17, 2019.
This new legislation amends the following three laws:
- the Law of 18 April 2001 on authors’ rights, related rights, and databases, as amended,
- the Law of 3 December 2015 on certain authorized uses of orphan works, and
- the Law of 25 April 2018 on the collective management of author’s rights and neighboring rights.
Important notes
The Luxembourg legislation properly transposes the New Copyright Directive into Luxembourg law, with the goal of modernizing the legal system of authors’ rights and neighboring rights. The New Copyright Directive was designed to take into account the enormous technological advances of the previous two decades, as well as new methods of generating, producing, distributing, and exploiting works and other protected property.
The following are the major modifications to the author’s rights regime:
The establishment of adjacent rights for press publishers (the right of reproduction and the right to make press publications available to the public) in relation to the use of their content online; subject to certain limitations, would allow press publishers to seek compensation when their content is reused by online platforms, news search engines, and news aggregators.
The establishment of an authorization procedure and a new liability framework for online content-sharing service providers who make certain uses of copyrighted information (such as YouTube).
The establishment of new exceptions to the authors’ rights in order to promote, in particular, text and data mining under certain conditions (which is a set of automated techniques aimed at analyzing texts and data in digital form in order to extract information) and the digital use of the works, exclusively for purposes of illustration in the context of teaching, to the extent justified by the non-commercial purpose pursued;
The enshrinement of a concept of suitable and equitable recompense for writers when they enter into license or assignment agreements about the exploitation of their work, as well as the opportunity for authors to seek further compensation. The parties with whom the writers have signed a license or an assignment agreement must present the authors with information on the exploitation of their works, namely the total money produced, at least once a year. If the original agreed-upon payment proves to be excessively low in proportion to the overall money received from the exploitation of the works, the authors shall be entitled to adequate and fair extra remuneration.
It remains to be seen if the new legislation will result in more balanced interactions between the various Luxembourg market participants in terms of the usage and exploitation of works and protected property.
The legislation must yet be passed. Once the legislation has been enacted, it must be promulgated within three months. In this situation, it will most likely be considerably sooner, as the New Copyright Directive was supposed to be implemented by 7 June 2021.
You can find the list of Luxembourg IP Firms here.