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Austria has fully implemented the provisions of the DSM directive into national law. The changes to the Copyright Act took effect on the 31st of December 2021.
Procedure:
The Austrian Ministry of Justice held a number of public consultations during which it organized stakeholder meetings, and has shared drafts of various parts of the directive with stakeholders for comments and discussion. A consolidated draft of the implementation law has been published for public consultation in September 2021. The Parliament held an expert hearing (in the legal affairs committee) before adopting the law in both chambers of Parliament.
Article 17:
Austria has introduced ex-ante user rights safeguards against the blocking of legitimate uses by carving out “uses of small parts of a work” from the obligation to prevent the availability of protected works and by requiring that uploaders must have the ability to flag uploads as legitimate. Licensed uses or uses of public domain material are not, however, awarded ex-ante protection. Platforms have to provide users with adequate information on the functioning of the automatic blocking procedures. A provision that would have allowed users’ organisations to take collective action on behalf of users against platforms that repeatedly block legal uploads has been deleted in the final version of the law.
Other:
The implementation law creates a carve-out from the existing protection for unoriginal photographs for reproductions of works of visual art that are in the public domain. The education exception is subject to a license override for certain categories and types of works. The implementation of the press publishers’ rights is highly problematic as it is subject to mandatory collective management, applies to a wide spectrum of publications (including blogs), and is included in the scope of the Article 17 implementation.
Bonus:
The Austrian Article 17 implementation draft has made an important contribution to the discussion about implementing article 17 by showing that the approach first proposed in Germany can be integrated into copyright legislation of other Member States.
During the implementation process, the Austrian Ministry of Justice has shared drafts of various parts of the directive with stakeholders for comments and discussion. A consolidated draft of the implementation law has been published for public consultation in September 2021. Despite extensive feedback from civil society identifying a number of problems with the draft no further changes were made and the implementation law was adopted in December 2021.
With regards to the implementation of Article 17, the Austrian proposal takes up key elements first introduced in the German implementation drafts, most notably the protection of minor uses from automated filters and the ability for users to flag uploads as legitimate. The final implementation is missing some safeguards for public domain works and for the use of images that are present in the German implementation.
As part of the Article 17 implementation Austria has implemented a new exception allowing the use of protected works for the purposes of caricature, pastiche and parody, but this new exception only applies to uses made on online platforms.
Local partners: Our local partner has been epicenter.works
For more information please see our implementation tracking page for Austria.
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Credits
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