After the EU Copyright Directive was passed by the EU Parliament last month (see our original blog post for further details), it was formally approved by the Council of the European Union on April 15, 2019. Nineteen EU member states, including Germany, France and the UK, voted in favor. Six member states – namely Finland, Italy, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Poland and Sweden – voted against the Directive, while three countries abstained from the vote.

In its press release of April 15, 2019, the EU Council called the Directive a way to modernize existing EU copyright law to “pave the way towards a true digital single market”.

Following the publication of the directive in the Official Journal of the EU, member states will have 24 months to transpose the new rules into their national law. German government officials have announced that the German transposition of the Directive will try to avoid and prevent the implementation of so-called upload filters as far as possible.

Click here for the full text of the adopted Directive.

This article was originally published on AllAboutIP – Mayer Brown’s blog on relevant developments in the fields of intellectual property and unfair competition law.