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Finland adopted changes to its copyright act, transposing all the provisions of the DSM directive on 28 February 2023.
Procedure:
From 2019 to late 2021 the Finnish Ministry of Education and Culture conducted a broad, open stakeholder debate with various consultation rounds that seemed to result in a fundamental rights-preserving implementation. However, at the end of 2021, the Ministry abruptly changed course: it sidelined the responsible civil servant and hired a consultant who had previously worked for Finnish rightsholder associations. The Ministry subsequently published a draft implementation law and submitted it to the Parliament. The national implementation law was approved by the Parliament, through an ordinary legislative procedure.
Article 17:
The Finnish implementation of Article 17 contains only a general requirement not to limit legitimate uses, without any specific ex-ante measures to protect users rights. Instead, the law mandates that online content sharing service providers have “practices and procedures in place to ensure that its measures (...) do not prevent the lawful use of works”.
The law does not contain any additional transparency provisions and it does not narrow down the definition of platforms affected by these rules.
Other:
The Finnish implementation of the new education exception does not fully comply with Article 5, as it does not apply to the press publishers right. Furthermore, all uses under the new education exception are subject to license availability, which renders the exception practically useless, since extended collective licenses have a strong prevalence in Finland and there will probably only be a few cases where no educational license is easily available in the market.
Article 14 is implemented in the provision that protects photographic images with a neighboring right. A new sentence was introduced stating that the right does not apply to photographs of works of art whose term of protection has expired. Significantly, the new provision broadens the scope to "work of art" as compared to "work of visual art" in the DSM directive.
The implementation of Article 15 includes most of the limits foreseen in the DSM Directive: scientific and academic publications are excluded from the definition of press publications; the right does not apply to private or non-commercial uses by individual users, to acts of hyperlinking nor to the use of individual words and very short extracts from press publications; and the right cannot be invoked against uses authorized by a non-exclusive license nor against the use of public domain works. However, the right is not subject to all the exceptions and limitations to copyright laid out in the national law.
Bonus:
The Finnish law provides that both the user and the online content sharing service provider have “the right to bring an action against the author for damage caused by an unfounded request to prevent access to a protected work or to remove the work”.
Finland has fully implemented the provisions of the DSM Directive into national law on 28 February 2023.
The Finnish implementation process has undergone a dramatic shift from being one of the most transparent exercises to becoming a process fully captured by rightsholders in its final stage. From 2019 to late 2021, the Finnish Ministry of Education and Culture conducted an open debate series organized around 6 themes to collect all viewpoints and concerns from all stakeholders. This process moved through various rounds and seemed to result in a fundamental rights-preserving implementation of Article 17 that centered on a proposed user rights preserving "blocking procedure". However, at the end of 2021, the Ministry abruptly changed course, sidelined the responsible civil servant and hired a consultant who had previously worked for Finnish rightholder associations. The Ministry subsequently published a draft implementation law that lacked the safeguards found in previous versions. The final implementation text does not contain any specific ex-ante safeguards for users.
The new education exception (a novelty in a system where extended collective licenses have a strong prevalence) does not fully comply with the Directive, as it does not apply to the press publisher right, and licenses take priority for all uses permitted under the exception. Furthermore, the implementation of the new press publishers right is subject to fewer exceptions than similar neighboring rights.
Article 14 is implemented by means of an exclusion to the scope of protection of the neighboring right that protects photographic images.
Our partner has been Open Knowledge Finland.
For more information please see our implementation tracking page for Finland.
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