Is it automatic?

I quite enjoyed reading through AG Szpunar’s opinion on in the the VG Bild Kunst v Stiftung Preußischer Kulturbesitz that was published Yesterday. Szpunar’s legal reasoning is a joy to read and while there are some hair-raising interpretation of core internet concepts overall the opinion shows that he does know what he is talking about.

As to his conclusion, this one is likely to be quite far reaching. He is effectively proposing a new scope of the communication to the public right in the context of hyper-linking, abandoning the all encompassing “new public” test with a more nunaced(?) “is it automatic?” test.

From an internet perspective this certainly looks quite silly. But from a copyright perspective (if one approaches copyright acknowledging that the purpose of copyright is to give creators some limited amount of control over how their creations are used) it is actually quite elegant.

I think what he proposes works well in the context of understanding the internet as people-browsing-webpages-and-looking-at-things. What i am concerned about is that this may have all kinds of limiting effects in the internet understood as machines-talking-to-machines context. It seems important to explore this notion further (which strikes me as being part of a much larger discussion about machines interacting with copyright without much human involvement, which also covers the AI and copyright discourse).