pts.
points
Lithuania has fully implemented the provisions of the DSM Directive into national law. The changes to the Copyright Act took effect on the 30th of March 2022.
Procedure:
The Ministry of Culture formed a small working group to work on the implementation in 2020, which included no civil society representatives, apart from the National Library. After the discussions held by the group (which covered all articles of the Directive, except Article 17), the Ministry shared a draft implementation law with the group members. There was no open, public consultation, but the Ministry did accept written contributions by stakeholders. The national implementation law was approved by the Parliament, through an ordinary legislative procedure.
Article 17:
The Lithuanian implementation of Article 17 does not contain any general or specific ex-ante safeguards for users rights, requiring disputed uploads to stay down during the complaint procedure. It also does not contain additional transparency provisions nor does it narrow down the definition of platforms affected by these rules.The Lithuania lawmaker mandates platforms to establish and publish on their websites procedures for blocking, removing and restoring access to content in their platforms, further allowing (but not mandating) platforms to provide for sanctions against those who abuse automated content identification technologies or that make “malicious or unfounded complaints”.
Other:
Lithuania implemented Article 5 of the DSM Directive by amending its existing education and research exception, which only covered the act of reproduction. The amended exception goes way beyond the minimum required by the DSM Directive, covering all acts of use foreseen by the Directive of all categories of protected materials, not only for educational purposes but also for research purposes, and without limiting the type of person or entity that can benefit from the exception. Furthermore, the condition that uses shall take place through a secure electronic network only applies when the uses are made by educational establishments. The exception is not subject to remuneration nor license available, but it only applies to short works in their entirety or short extracts of wider work.
Article 14 was implemented by means of an exclusion from the scope of protection of copyright. When implementing the new press publishers right, the national lawmaker adopted a strict definition of what constitutes “very short extracts”, excluding from the scope of protection of the new right a maximum of 125 characters from a press publication (excluding headlines).
Bonus:
Lithuania introduced a standalone exception for caricature, parody and pastiche.
Lithuania fully transposed the provisions of the DSM directive on March 30, 2022. The implementation law was adopted following an ordinary legislative process including a working group based on a preliminary draft law.
The transposition of Article 17 does not contain any specific ex-ante safeguards for users' rights, requiring disputed uploads to stay down during the complaint procedure. The national lawmaker introduced a full exception for caricature, parody and pastiche, which applies to uses beyond uses on Online Content Sharing Service Providers.
Lithuania updated its existing exception for education and scientific research purposes, going beyond the minimum required by Article 5 of the DSM Directive. The amended exception is not subject to remuneration nor to license availability, and covers all types of uses and all categories of protected materials (but it only applies to short works in their entirety or short extracts of wider work). Reproductions of public domain works of visual arts are excluded from the scope of protection of copyright. The implementation of the new press publishers' right is rather expensive, as it excludes from the scope of protection of the new right only “very short extracts” that have a maximum of 125 characters (excluding headlines).
Local partners: Our local partner has been the Baltic Audio Visual Archival Council.
For more information please see our implementation tracking page for Lithuania.
License information
This site is hosted by Communia, the International Association On the Digital Public Domain. We release all our documents, reports, infographics and researches under the Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication (CC0). Unless otherwise stated, images are released under CC0 as well. Please feel free to download and reuse.
Credits
The font used in this project is under the SIL Open Font License, and it's provided by Creative Sauce Design. The photos used in this website to better illustrate each EU Member State were downloaded form Flickr and therein stored under CC-BY or CC-BY-NC licenses.