“According to the draft, the Copyright Directive must be implemented within 12 months from the date it enters into force, and it enters into force 20 days after its publication. Consequently, we can expect that by April 2020 at the latest, changes to national regulations should be in place to ensure the directive’s application in Poland.

As a result, the government should soon begin the legislative process and prepare a draft law amending the current copyright act as well as other legal acts relating to areas covered by the directive. Given the public attention surrounding this directive, we can expect broad consultations with industry stakeholders and society regarding the shape of such a draft.

It is difficult to predict the actual consequences of implementing the directive into Polish law, particularly since EU member states always retain a degree of discretion — both in terms of the manner of implementation (i.e., how exactly the mechanisms outlined in the directive will function within a given country) and the extent of implementation (i.e., member states often introduce additional limitations or provisions to ‘complement’ the implemented directive). One cannot rule out the possibility that a new organization will be established to handle negotiations between authors and content aggregators, or that an existing organization will assume this role.

The burden of the directive’s consequences on internet users themselves will largely depend on how well cooperation develops in enforcing the directive’s principles — for example, between publishers and social media platforms — rather than on the implementation timeline or legal structure alone. Certainly, we should not expect any kind of sudden “internet censorship” to be introduced overnight. It is more appropriate to view the situation through the lens of what happened on YouTube when music creators began asserting their rights, leading the platform to block or mute videos using copyrighted content. Naturally, this assumes successful negotiations between authors (especially publishers) and major platforms or aggregators.

There is, of course, a risk that platforms like Facebook will choose to cooperate only with selected publishers. This could potentially result in restrictions on users’ ability to share content from non-affiliated sources. As a consequence, some might view this as a threat to media pluralism online — a development introduced not only under the guise of law, but arguably promoted and even enforced by that very law,” explained Michał Jeleń.

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