Today, COMMUNIA made a submission to the EU Start-up and Scale-up Strategy call for evidence (available as a PDF file). Due to COMMUNIA’s focus on access to knowledge, we focused on this issue, outlining specific barriers to access to knowledge that apply to start-ups and scale-ups as well as the research sector, which is the […]
This week, COMMUNIA made a submission to a call for evidence on the evaluation of the Geo-blocking Regulation (available as a PDF file). The European Commission is set to review the rules for geo-blocking, including for audiovisual services and copyright-protected works, this year. After the stakeholder dialogue on access to and availability of audiovisual works […]
Today, we are publishing our 2024 annual report that covers COMMUNIA’s activities between January 1, 2024 to December 31, 2024. This corresponds to the second reporting period for our structural grant from Arcadia, a charitable fund of Lisbet Rausing and Peter Baldwin. Over the last year, we benefited from the consolidated organisational structure and an […]
With all the hearings of Commissioners-designate in the books, we present to you our key insights for copyright policy. Unsurprisingly, copyright is only one among many concerns of von der Leyen’s second mandate. Nonetheless, it is a cross-cutting issue that will keep multiple members of her College busy. Two hearings stood out in particular: Ekaterina […]
Five of the biggest publishers in the world, Hachette Book Group, HarperCollins Publishers, John Wiley & Sons, and Penguin Random House, are currently suing the Internet Archive in the US for lending digital scans of books in its collection on a one-copy-one-user basis. The Second Circuit Court of Appeals has now confirmed the ruling of […]
The Italian Ministry of Culture has taken legal proceedings in Italy against a number of commercial uses of Public Domain works held in Italian collections. Defendants included GQ Italia (for using Michelangelo’s David on a magazine cover), Jean Paul Gaultier (for using Botticelli’s The Birth of Venus in a clothing collection) and, of particular interest […]
Yesterday, the European Parliament voted against a review of the geo-blocking rules for audiovisual (AV) content. Parliament adopted an IMCO own-initiative report on the implementation of the 2018 Geo-blocking Regulation, but also passed a number of amendments to effectively exclude AV content from the scope of a review. While the result isn’t binding, this is […]
We certainly didn’t ask for this, but Italy appears to have made it its mission to show why our work at COMMUNIA is as relevant as ever: by launching an attack on the Public Domain. Since October last year, Italian courts have applied the country’s Cultural Heritage Code (hereinafter shortened to “the Code”) in a […]
Two weeks ago, the Uffizi Gallery sent ripples through the open community by suing French fashion designer Jean Paul Gaultier for using Sandro Botticelli’s The Birth of Venus (1483) — which is on display in the Uffizi — in a clothing collection. Botticelli’s death in 1510 preceded the birth of copyright by centuries and his […]
