In August 2025, the Italian Competition Authority (Autorità Garante della Concorrenza e del Mercato) published a preliminary report of the findings of the IC57 – Scholastic Publishing Fact-Finding Investigation. Today, COMMUNIA made a submission in response to the preliminary report (available as a PDF file).
COMMUNIA welcomes the the preliminary report, as it overlaps with our own study of licensing practices in the library sector published earlier in 2025 (available as a PDF file). Through our discussions with licensing managers from academic and public libraries as well as library consortia and the analysis of licensing contract provisions, we were able to documents a range of issues that are directly pertinent to this investigation, including excessive pricing, restrictive use terms, and the dependence on proprietary platforms.
The transition towards a licensing model has created a clear imbalance in licensing negotiations in favour of rightholders who often exploit their position to segment access and tailor use conditions to the detriment of users rights. To restore equilibrium, access rights should be explicitly granted wherever lawful access is necessary for users to effectively exercise their rights under existing copyright exceptions and limitations.
The Authority should therefore consider the introduction of specific measures to facilitate licensing and acquisition of digital works, such as an obligation to provide access to digital formats under fair and reasonable conditions. So long as such an obligation is subject to a use-specific proportionality assessment, this should not place an undue burden on rightholders while marking an important step towards fixing the imbalance in the licensing ecosystem.
Other COMMUNIA publications provide further evidence and detailed policy recommendations:
- COMMUNIA Policy Paper #21 on the right to license and own digital materials,
- the individual expert study Copyright as an Access Right: Concretizing Positive Obligations for Rightholders to Ensure the Exercise of User Rights, commissioned by COMMUNIA and Knowledge Rights 21 to Christophe Geiger Bernd and Justin Jütte, and
- our study Educational Licenses in Europe.
