Some (Non-Representative) Experiences of the Transposition and Application of Press Publishers’ Rights in Hungary

Abstract

Access to information, consumption of media products and mass media have changed radically in the age of digital technologies. News aggregation and aggregator services have become indispensable, as have social media sites that make news produced by press publishers available to the public. The press publishers’ right, adopted in the EU Directive on Copyright and Related Rights in the Digital Single Market to address this situation, has raised a number of questions, the most pressing of which have not been answered by the transposition and subsequent events. These include whether competition law instruments can be more effective in tackling dominant platform giants, which appear reluctant to reach agreements with publishers. A further dilemma is whether the principle of contractual freedom is violated by trying to force industry platforms to enter into Article 15 licence agreement, when experience so far has shown that platforms would rather stop indexing content if they have to pay for its use. Although the legislative intention is more than welcome, it seems that the press publishers’ right has resulted in a fox in the hand situation. In order to address the issues of press publishers’ rights, we felt it important to survey press publishers in Hungary through a questionnaire survey – the results of this survey are published in this paper.