The technical framing protection will be replaced by a "monitoring" procedure. The agreement only relates to the use of the images in the German Digital Library itself.
Following negotiations before the Federal Court of Justice (BGH) and the European Court of Justice (ECJ), the latter had established that authors can, in principle, demand that the works they have created, if they are shown on the Internet under a corresponding licence, be protected by means of technical measures against third parties embedding these images in another website via a frame or inline link.
However, the question of whether a collecting society such as VG Bild-Kunst may make such technical measures a blanket requirement for the licensing of such images without an express mandate from the authors it represents had not yet been clarified. The question of the reasonableness of the implementation of said technical measures would also have had to be clarified in detail by the Berlin Court of Appeal, to which the legal dispute had been referred back for clarification of the facts. According to the Berlin Court of Appeal, this would probably have required an expert opinion on the cost of introducing effective protective measures, which would then have had to be weighed against the risk of commercial exploitation of the images by the "framing" third parties.
In June 2022, the Berlin Court of Appeal finally suggested negotiations on an amicable agreement between VG Bild-Kunst and the German Digital Library in order to jointly evaluate the risk situation with regard to the unlicensed use of preview images by third parties on an ongoing basis during a test phase.
Both parties followed this suggestion and, in view of the difficult factual and balancing issues that would otherwise have to be clarified by the court, decided to seek an agreement in order to avoid possibly prolonging the legal dispute for years with an incalculable result.
As a result, the parties have now agreed on a five-year test phase during which the Deutsche Digitale Bibliothek may display images of works of fine art from VG Bild-Kunst's repertoire on its portal. At the same time, the Deutsche Digitale Bibliothek has committed itself to a monitoring procedure that will uncover potential cases of framing and report them to VG Bild-Kunst. At the request of VG Bild-Kunst, the German Digital Library must prevent framing in these cases. The purpose of the procedure is to be able to assess at the end of the test period whether the implementation of effective technical protective measures is necessary or whether the monitoring procedure should be continued. In this respect, the monitoring procedure can help to better assess the overall risk of framing, also with regard to other organisations that use works from the VG Bild-Kunst repertoire.
All press releases of the German Digital Library on the "framing legal dispute"