Blog

Last week COMMUNIA submitted its response to the European Commission’s public consultation on the evaluation and modernisation of the legal framework for the enforcement of intellectual property rights (IPR). We believe that the existing Directive fails to adequately address the varying types (and by extension, impact) of activities that would technically constitute copyright infringement. This […]

It is relatively well documented that neither the French nor publishers are big fans of copyright reform. Given this, the comments from the CEO of the French publisher Hachette Livre on at last week’s London Book Fair are not entirely surprising.   Less than three weeks after the European Commission launched a consultation that appears […]

Last January, COMMUNIA invited creators to share thoughts about their relationship with the public domain. They spoke at the Public Domain Day 2016 event we organised in the European Parliament, hosted by MEP Felix Reda. We learned from their experiences that copyright can be perceived as a hurdle for creators, that sharing your work into […]

In the ongoing reform of copyright, the European Commission has presented a conservative approach . There are some alarming ideas being raised, such as ancillary copyright and broadening the scope of internet intermediaries’ liability. If these concepts are translated into policy, it would make copyright even more complicated to understand and the internet a less […]

BEUC, the European Consumers Association, has just launched a campaign against geo blocking. COMMUNIA has been using this term mainly in order to refer to the practice of limiting access to copyright protected content – such as films or music – to specific national markets. This prevents internet users from outside of that market to […]

We spend a lot of effort pointing out that additional copyright, like rights for specific groups of rights holders, are a problematic concept that has potential to cause a lot of damage to the Public Domain. Most of our coverage has focused on efforts to establish an ancillary copyright for press publishers. We have seen […]

The European Commission is currently holding a consultation on the 2004 directive on the enforcement of intellectual property rights in the online environment (the so called IPRED directive). As the name suggests, this directive deals with the enforcement of copyright – including issues such as injunctions against internet service providers, internet blocking, and warning letters […]

It’s Fair Use Week, and organizations and individuals are publishing blog posts, hosting workshops, and sharing educational media about the implementation and importance of this essential limitation to the rights endowed by copyright. Fair use is a flexible legal tool that permits some uses of copyrighted material without permission from the original rightsholder, such as for use […]

In 2012 the European Parliament adopted the Directive on ‘certain permitted uses of orphan works by cultural heritage institutions’. The directive intends to fill the gap between the mission of cultural heritage institutions to share cultural works to citizens, and the complex, costly, and sometimes impossible task of locating rightsholders to get permission for online […]

While at this stage almost everyone agrees that the EU’s 2001 Copyright Framework is outdated and needs to be reformed, there is a very broad spectrum of ideas of what such a reform should look like. Recently, two of the three EU legislative bodies (who will need to agree on the final outcome) have laid […]