Research on Transposition of Mandatory Filtering Obligation of the EU Copyright Directive

Since Article 17 of the 2019 Copyright Directive in the Digital Single Market of the EU was controversial at the formulation stage, the transposition process has been difficult. Taking the Netherlands, Germany and Finland as examples to study the transposition approach, it is found that: (1) Article 17 is one of the major obstacles to the transposition of the Copyright Directive in the Digital Single Market into national law; (2) the legal text of the transposition of Article 17 is usually accompanied by flexible clauses; (3) EU Member States have adopted different approaches to implement Article 17, which aggravates the division within the EU; (4) Member states have paid varying degrees of attention to the protection of users’ freedom when implementing Article 17. China should continue to pay attention to the implementation of Article 17 of the Copyright Directive in the Digital Single Market , to encourage right-holders to strengthen cooperation with service providers, and stress the protection of users’ freedom and improve liability regime in copyright field for service providers to consider their own conditions.