The Danish Minister for Culture Jakob Engel-Schmidt has emphasized that LinkedIn is obligated to comply with the law and that he is actively working – both in Denmark and at the EU level – to ensure that press publishers’ rights are upheld.
Advocate General Szpunar is also clear in the opinion in case C-797/23: by means of sophisticated algorithms, a platform which suggests specific content to users according to their supposed centres of interest, without those users having carried out any search for that content or it being suggested to them by other users is not merely a passive place for sharing content between users. A social media network is, therefore, a truly autonomous content provider, whose specific characteristic is that the content is neither created nor purchased by it: that content is uploaded by users and the platform is then responsible for offering it to users. Such use must be regarded as being carried out by the ISSP (article 15), and, therefore, in so far as it concerns press publications, as falling within the exclusive rights of publishers.
Press publishers’ rights pursue a public interest objective recognised by the EU legislature; strengthening the economic viability of the press, a key pillar of democracy.
We had hoped that LinkedIn – also due to the Microsoft ownership – would have engaged in a mutual beneficial partnership.