“Debates are taking place globally as to what role platforms should take with regards to the content they offer or host. In the EU, a first step to regulate this environment was taken with the 2019 EU Digital Single Market Directive (“DSM”). This new piece of legislation and specifically Article 17, presents an opportunity for platforms and the publishing industry to work together to enable the appropriate use of protected content and to ensure an improved experience for platform users.

Article 17 confirms platforms are liable for the content they host unless they receive authorization from the publisher. This could be, for instance through a license or by ensuring the unavailability of protected works. Meanwhile, publishers are obliged to make available “the necessary and relevant information”.

In 2019 STM assembled a working group to develop the necessary technical processes to implement these new obligations, in order to enable platforms to swiftly identify the content and respective policies to make sharing decisions in real-time using technology. These technical processes are described in the Article Sharing Framework, which enables the simple and seamless sharing of content in manners that are consistent with publisher policies….”

“In the European Union, an initiative to address this issue was finalized in a 2019 change to the EU Copyright Directive, the Directive on Copyright in the Digital Single Market (official text here). That new law took effect in June 2019 and must be translated into national law by EU Member States by June 2021. SCNs — some of which qualify as Online Content Sharing Service Providers, or OCSSPs as they are referred to in the Directive — fall within the scope of the new rules and, thus, are required to follow certain steps and obligations if they want to preserve the possibility avoiding liability for copyright infringement under the Directive. In particular, OCSSPs have to make “best efforts to ensure the unavailability” of protected works for which rightsholders have provided “relevant and necessary information”. In other words, in order for platforms to meet their obligation, publishers themselves have an obligation to give information, regarding rights and permissions of content sharing, in a method that can be feasibly leveraged at scale by SCNs….

In order to address this challenge, a team under the STM Association’s, STEC Committee, developed the Article Sharing Framework. The Framework gives scholarly publishers a mechanism to provide SCNs — in machine-actionable form — information about an article’s PDF’s identity and the respective publisher’s sharing policies. This enables SCNs to use the information to determine in an automated way, and in real-time, whether the publisher’s content may be shared….”