The EU press publishers' right: past, present, and future

Abstract: This master thesis is dedicated to the press publishers’ right introduced by Article 15 of the Directive (EU) 2019/790 on copyright and related rights in the Digital Single Market. The article became one of the most debated provisions in the whole directive. On the one hand, the discussion was driven by EU press publishers because of thecommercial crisis in the traditional press publishing and news mediasectors. Press representatives began to express concerns about the free riding of press publications by content aggregators and search engines who usually reuse such contents for profit. On the other hand, service providers argued that press publishers would lose traffic to their websites, affecting the quality of the press and constrainingfundamental rights. This conflict pushed the press publishers to bringing these issues before courts, legislators and competition authorities. Since these complaints were not resolved completely, the only way to resolve the conflict seemed to be the introduction of the EU-wide related right.