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Lisbon Council has published the “2015 Intellectual Property and Economic Growth Index”, which aims to provide evidence for impact of different copyright regimes on economic growth. Positive relation between flexible copyright regimes and economic growth, including in the creative sectors, is the main finding of the report. Paul Keller, from our member organisation Kennisland, has […]

The aim of this position paper is to respond to the call made by European Commission to open public discussion on digital single market and its expected shape in the coming years. We fully agree with President Juncker that we need to “break down national silos in copyright”. As was noted by President Juncker in […]

A balancing of viewpoints and interests in the European copyright debate has been a commonly shared goal since the 2013 “Licenses for Europe” stakeholder dialogue. A key outcome of last year’s EU consultation on copyright has been that the current copyright law is unbalanced – while rights holders and producers are satisfied with the status […]

Soon the most valuable digital works of art and culture may be available all around Europe, free of charge, licenses, watermarks, and in open, machine-readable formats.  Together with their metadata they can be used to not only promote rich heritage of our culture, but also to build innovative applications, web services and boost the creative […]

This week is Copyright Week, a series of actions and discussions supporting key principles that should guide copyright policy. Every day this week, various groups are taking on different elements of the law, and addressing what’s at stake, and what we need to do to make sure that copyright promotes creativity and innovation. Today’s subject is the Public Domain. Despite […]

This post was originally published on the Creative Commons blog under CC BY 4.0. This week is Copyright Week, a series of actions and discussions supporting key principles that should guide copyright policy. Every day this week, various groups are taking on different elements of the law, and addressing what’s at stake, and what we need to do to make […]

Today Copyright 4 Creativity (C4C), a coalition of 35 organisations from the NGO, library and technology sectors (including a number of COMMUNIA members) is launching a copyright manifesto. The copyright manifesto is intended as a contribution to the ongoing review of the European Union’s copyright rules. With the manifesto, Copyright 4 Creativity wants to stress […]

As part of the public consultation on a review of the EU copyright rules the EU commission included two questions related to a single EU copyright title. These questions refer to the fact that in the current situation all member states of the EU have their own copyright laws. These laws need to meet the […]

Last week Communia joined the “European Observatory on Infringements of IPR” which is hosted by the European Union’s Office of Harmonization in the Internal Market (OHIM). The Observatory’s task is to provide the EU Commission with insights on every aspect of IPR infringement. It does so primarily by conducting surveys and studies on how, where […]

For those of us looking forward to copyright rules that enable European cultural heritage institutions to provide online access to their collections, two important things happened last week: on Wednesday 29th October, the Orphan Works directive (OW directive) came into force and on Saturday 1st November, the new European Commission headed by Jean-Claude Juncker assumed office. The first event […]