The Arbitration Board of the German Patent and Trade Mark Office (UrhWG) has come to a decision regarding the ancillary copyright law for the first time: The ancillary copyright law right has been into force since 2013 and is administered by the collecting society for press publishers VG Media. Raue LLP represents VG Media in three landmark cases against Google, Yahoo! und Deutsche Telekom AG (T-Online).
Subject is the question of whether search engines and news aggregators have to pay compensation to the publishers or the VG Media for displaying text excerpts and images in their search results. The arbitration board has now affirmed this matter but has not decided on an appropriate amount of compensation.
The board has rejected any concerns on the European legal and constitutional admissibility of the ancillary copyright law and declared the tariff of the VG Media as generally applicable. It has further clarified other important issues in favor of VG Media. Now publishers who publish press articles without technical protection against search engines on the Internet can rely on the ancillary copyright law as well. Also, the license-free range of the “smallest text snippets” was narrowly defined to the benefit of publishers with an upper limit of seven words. The use of images is fully subject to remuneration.
These decisions are proposals for a settlement among the parties that can be challenged by the parties.