Article 17 forum
Photo: Michael Fousert
About Article 17 Forum
The Article 17 Forum is a forum under the Ministry of Culture between online sharing platforms and Danish rights holders. Its purpose is to follow the platforms’ implementation and development of solutions to protect against illegal content sharing.
Illegal streaming on social media
In a survey, the Danish Chamber of Commerce has mapped Danes’ habits and attitudes towards streaming illegal content online. The study states that almost one in ten Danes (9 per cent) have shared, received or accessed illegal content on social media in the past 12 months.
The consumption of illegal content, such as films, series and music, has been increasingly driven to legal social platforms in recent years. According to Article 17, the 2019 EU Copyright Directive and the 2021 Copyright Act, these platforms are responsible for ensuring that only legal content is available on sharing platforms with user-uploaded content.
This means that platforms like Google and Facebook must provide rights holders with access to relevant and up-to-date tools that can detect and remove copyright infringing material. In Denmark, the law requires that this access is initially established through agreements between rights holders and platforms, without the need for government intervention.
In 2021, RettighedsAlliancen therefore initiated a voluntary ‘Article 17 Forum’, which has been joined by major platforms such as Google, Facebook and TikTok, who participate together with RettighedsAlliancen as representatives of the rights holders. The purpose of the ‘Article 17 Forum’ is to monitor that access to the tools remains up to date and to address any issues in a timely manner, while the concrete use of the tools is clarified bilaterally.
The Rights Alliance’s commitment to ensuring effective tools has led to positive results in removing illegal content and working with the platforms to develop the use of the tools to deal with new types of illegal content. On behalf of the ‘Article 17 Forum’, RettighedsAlliancen informs the Ministry of Culture about the application of the possibilities in Article 17.