New provisions in the Swiss Copyright Act

The Swiss Copyright Act was amended to include new provisions effective as of 1 April 2020. In short, the main changes are the following:

/ Photographs that are have no individual character may be protected. A photograph will not need to be sufficiently individual unlike other works in order to be protected under the Act. “Non-individual” photographs will be subject to a different term of protection from individual works.

/ Authors and performing authors of audio-visual works will be entitled to remuneration for the rental of such works.

/ All kinds works whose authors may not be identified or traced (orphaned works) may be used against the payment of a fee to the collective management organisation.

/ Further exceptions to an author’s copyright will be introduced such as the use in favour of scientific research for the purpose of researching large amount of data or the establishment by institutions of internal inventories.

/ Collective licences will be introduced thanks to which a person or entity may request the use of a large number of rights and works.

/ Hosting providers will have a stay down obligation, i.e. to permanently remove copyright-infringing content from their servers.

/ Right owners will be able to obtain the IP address from which online copyright-infringing content came from in the context of a criminal complaint.

/ The term of protection for related rights will be increased from the current 50 years to 70 years.