Abstract:

The Digital Single Market Copyright Directive (Directive (EU) 2019/790 of the European Parliament and of the Council) which was approved in 2019 and must be implement by EU countries in their national laws by 21st June 2021.

Its most controversial part is the change to the liability of online platforms. Article 17 of the Directive says that platforms which allow users to upload digital content will be more liable than before if that material infringes copyright.

The change is intended to ensure that content creators are more likely to get paid when their work is accessed. However, EU countries have expressed concerns about the consequences. They fear of 'over-blocking', where legitimate content is blocked by automated upload filtering systems.

The key goals of the directive are: protecting press publications; reducing the "value gap" between the profits made by Internet platforms and by content creators; encouraging collaboration between these two groups, and creating copyright exceptions for text- and data-mining. The problem the directive attempts to overcome is the piracy. For ordinary users the most controversial part is the reduction of the value gap. The idea behind the directive is the reconciliation of the relations between users, authors and providers of digital content. This issue remains very controversial.

That is why we asked the Czech university students what they think about this new directive, if they know about it, if they agree to it, how often they download the copyrighted material and what motivates them to it. Another aspect of our questionnaire researched the impacts of the new directive on the educational process. Especially during the covid pandemic, a lot of digital content is uploaded and downloaded on various platforms, some content used for educational process may be copyrighted and because students can't attend universities which normally provide them with necessary digital content and software, there may be an increased tendency to download it. The new directive may thus complicate the educational process. The reasons for using pirated content may consist in addition to study purposes in occupational and private needs. We used the factors outlined by the theory of planned behaviour to differentiate between attitude, social norms and control to find triggers of piracy.

The preliminary results show low students’ awareness in the copyright legislation. They sometimes download the pirated content for study, occupational and private purposes because they don’t want to pay for it and it is complicated for them to find a platform that offers the copyrighted content in a user-friendly way. Many of them pay for some digital content platforms because the content is available in high quality and is well organized. They complain they have to pay for more providers to get all the content they would like to watch. An important question concerned the subjective price of the service. If it is lower than the real price, we can expect higher probability of piracy. The price increases with the pressure from universities and their employers to use the digital content. The perceived risks and negative consequences (including problems at school) have also an effect on the probability of piracy. We’d like to stress that these are preliminary results based on relatively small number of respondents and the final results may differ.

Keywords:

Copyright, law, digital piracy, students' attitude towards piracy, value gap, process of education