The European Commission has launched a call for evidence on a possible legislative initiative to create a “better copyright environment for European creativity and innovation”. The call for evidence accompanies both the upcoming review of the Copyright in the Digital Single Market (DSM) Directive and the Commission’s exploration of targeted reforms addressing challenges linked to AI, research and innovation. The deadline for submissions is June 25.
Our contribution draws on a growing body of evidence collected over the last two years from researchers, cultural heritage institutions, open-source AI developers and legal experts across Europe. Together, this evidence demonstrates that, while the DSM Directive introduced important improvements, researchers, cultural heritage institutions and public-interest AI developers continue to face barriers created by fragmented research exceptions, legal uncertainty as to the scope of application of the TDM exceptions, unfair licensing practices and technological restrictions. Publicly funded research outputs remain locked behind paywalls, while Public Domain materials are increasingly subject to new forms of exclusivity, limiting their availability for scientific research and innovation. At the same time, public-interest information infrastructures bear growing costs of supporting AI development without sharing in its economic benefits.
COMMUNIA’s response (see PDF here) thus argues that any future legislative initiative to support a competitive European knowledge economy should pursue three complementary objectives: increase the availability of high-quality knowledge resources, provide legal certainty for those who use them, and ensure the sustainability of the institutions that maintain them.
Increase the availability of knowledge resources
Scientific excellence, innovation and AI development all depend on the availability of high-quality resources that can be freely accessed, reused and built upon. COMMUNIA proposes to increase the availability of valuable knowledge resources through measures that ensure broad access to publicly funded research and strengthen safeguards for the Public Domain.
Evidence collected by the Commission shows that the prevailing scholarly publishing model frequently prevents researchers from making their own publications openly available and, as a result, a significant share of publicly funded research remains locked behind paywalls. To address this issue COMMUNIA calls for measures to establish a harmonised EU framework ensuring open access to publicly funded research outputs. Such a framework should combine a secondary publication obligation with a mandatory secondary publication right that allows authors to republish their research outputs through open-access repositories regardless of contractual arrangements with publishers.
COMMUNIA also calls for stronger safeguards for the Public Domain. Our research shows that, in several Member States, cultural heritage laws continue to create quasi-copyright restrictions over Public Domain artworks. In addition, based on available evidence, we estimate that at least two million books remain unavailable for AI training and other computational uses because of exclusive digitisation agreements. These restrictions undermine both access to culture and Europe’s ambitions to make cultural heritage collections available for AI development. In our response, we call for measures to prevent Member States from imposing authorisation requirements, remuneration obligations or equivalent restrictions that undermine the practical effect of Article 14 DSM. In addition, the Union should consider extending the logic underpinning this provision to other categories of works beyond visual art where similar risks of re-appropriation arise.
Strengthen legal certainty for research and public-interest AI
A recurring theme throughout our evidence base is legal uncertainty. Researchers and Public AI developers report difficulties sharing materials, collaborating across borders and relying on the scientific TDM exception for open-source and publicly funded AI projects. Libraries encounter licensing agreements that restrict research rights (including TDM and AI uses) and impose disproportionate liability for the conduct of users. Cultural heritage institutions more broadly often adopt excessively cautious approaches because of fears of liability.
To address these issues, COMMUNIA proposes a package of measures that includes:
- a general scientific research exception with cross-border effect;
- measures to prevent unfair licensing practices;
- measures to assert the overriding mandatory nature of research exceptions and protect them against choice-of-law agreements;
- stronger protections against technological overrides of research rights;
- and a limitation of liability for knowledge institutions acting diligently and in good faith.
Ensure the sustainability of the information ecosystem
The debate about AI and copyright has largely focused on the relationship between AI developers and copyright holders. While this discussion is important, it overlooks a broader reality. Commercial AI systems derive value from a much wider information ecosystem that includes scientific repositories, cultural heritage collections, Wikipedia and other open-access knowledge projects.
Many of these infrastructures are maintained through public funding or voluntary contributions and do not generate licensing revenues. At the same time, the institutions and communities that produce and maintain the underlying resources face rising costs associated with hosting, preservation, curation, digitisation, cybersecurity, infrastructure maintenance and AI-related traffic management, while receiving little or no compensation from the commercial deployment of AI systems.
COMMUNIA therefore calls on the Commission to explore mechanisms that would ensure that commercial AI systems that are deployed within the Union and that have been trained on publicly available information contribute to the sustainability of the information ecosystem on which they depend.
EDIT: A previous version of this blogpost had a link to COMMUNIA’s preliminary response to the call for evidence. On 24 June 2026, we replaced it with the final submission.
