The agencies monitoring daily press and magazines and selling it to their clients will have to make an agreement with publishers as the press will become a subject to the copyright law protection. MPs passed the amendment to the law on September 3, and refused to accept the objections of President Ivan Gašparovič who vetoed the bill in July and returned it to the parliament, the SITA newswire reported.
The president disagreed with proposal to consider the press collected works.
“In my opinion it is an unfounded protection if according to the passed law newspaper is a collected works and as such is subject to the copyright law,” Gašparovič said back in July.
He also said that through this change the rights of publishers will be protected, SITA wrote.
Earlier in the day the parliamentary media committee recommended that deputies not accept the comments of the president, as did the constitutional parliamentary committee, the TASR newswire wrote.
The Culture Ministry prepared the amendment to the copyright law to include the regulation of the European Parliament and Council of the European Union passed on September 27, 2011 over the term of copyright protection and some related laws into Slovakia’s legislation. It lengthens the protection of voice record of artistic performance from 50 to 70 years. The new law also states that the subject of the law will be the collected works in any form, including electronic ones which include analogue and digital forms, especially collections, newspapers, magazines, encyclopaedias, analogies, variety shows, exhibitions and databases. It also negatively defines the daily news.
The ministry said the new law is not aimed at monitoring agencies or other subjects monitoring the press.
“It responds to the practice when on one hand we have creators of newspapers and magazines, so-called collected works, and on the other hand companies which use part of newspapers and sell it as monitoring,” Culture Minister Marek Maďarič said, as quoted by SITA.
The new amendment will come into force on November 1, 2013.
Source: SITA, TASR
Compiled by Radka Minarechová from press reports
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