Have you heard of article 13, article 17 or even article 11?

How about the upload filter or link tax?

Probably not.

CJS has been following this since it first came to our attention in 2017 because it could have a major impact on our news service. The articles are part of the Copyright Directive which was passed in Strasbourg yesterday by a small majority of MEPs. Rather than going into details here read the explanation on The Guardian or BBC.

How will this affect CJS news?
First - it might look rather boring.
We are always careful to annotate and credit images but we have to assume that the images supplied are licensed for use by the organisation which sends us the press release. In future we won't be able to do that and will need specific licence details for each and every image used which means that most will simply have to be left out as there won't be time to double / triple check copyright licence arrangements before publication and to obtain our own copyright for each image would be costly and not viable within the time frame of the news turnaround.
Second - it might get really short or possibly very long!
This is because of article 11, the link tax, which could mean that we have to pay for every link we use (like those ones above to The Guardian and BBC). However the law does say that snippets of news articles are specifically excluded from the scope of the directive provided the snippets are kept very short. Alternatively we could post the press releases in full, or at least edit them to include the main points and not link direct to source.
Third - the scope will shrink, although we only use press releases in the daily news we check other news aggregators and publications, they are going to get caught in the same net and consequently it's going to be more difficult for us to source the information we use.
Fourth - we might have to charge you to access the news.
If we have to edit the press releases then that's going to involve a huge amount more time and effort which means more work for the CJS Team or maybe even recruiting journalists to our small team; both of which will significantly increase the costs involved. Paying to use each and every link also adds a financial burden both in terms of the payments we would have to make and the admin involved in sorting that little lot out.
Fifth and finally - the worse case scenario - we might have to pull the news service completely either because it becomes impossible to provide the news and stay within the law or it's not financially viable.

When will all this happen?
Good question, member states have up to 24 months to put it into national law - the UK should have left the EU by then so there won't be a requirement for the UK to follow suit but it's likely that we will stay aligned with other EU member states.

In the meantime we'll keep monitoring the situation and assessing all the options.
The news might get a little less picturesque as there is a possibility that some of the article 13 requirements could be backdated so we're going to have to be even more circumspect in which images we use. Despite being careful we have already been caught out on a couple of occasions and accidentally re-used copyright images for which we paid large sums for unauthorised use.