One of the most important amendments that came into force at the beginning of this year is undoubtedly the amendment to the Copyright Act, which significantly improves the position of authors and ensures better protection of their works in the digital space. Aa a part of the implementation of several directives of the European Parliament and the Council, the liability of online content sharing service providers and information society service providers has been tightened. The amendment also includes new types of statutory licences, mainly related to digital content.
Operators of online services that are used to share content for profit will now have to make their best efforts to obtain a licence for the uploaded and published work. Other obligations on operators then include, for example, making the work inaccessible or removing it from their websites after reasonable notice from the author and making best efforts to prevent its re-uploading. As these are relatively strict requirements, smaller providers may not fully comply with them under certain conditions.
A much-discussed change are the rights of publishers of press publications in relation to information society service providers (e.g. Google, Facebook). These providers are now obliged to negotiate a reasonable remuneration with press publishers if they continue to publish previews of newspaper articles, magazines, etc. The previous legislation allowed these providers to publish previews of works and place advertising to them without being obliged to provide any remuneration to the authors for the publication.
The last important change is the emergence of new types of statutory licences (the right to use a work without the author's permission and without payment of royalties). First of all, this is a licence for automated text or data analysis - so-called data mining. It is also a licence for the use of a work not available on the market, whereby cultural heritage institutions (e.g. a library or museum) can reproduce and make available on their websites for non-commercial purposes a work that is not available on the market. Other new statutory licences are the digital teaching licence and the pastiche licence.