To increase trust in the copyright system, Europe needs to impose sanctions on copyright abuse, such as false and misleading attempts to claim ownership of works, including Public Domain works, copyright trolling, the abuse of copyright enforcement systems for censorship, and other abusive practices.
Join us on October 2nd, from 1500h to 1700h, for an in-person event on why Europe needs a Digital Knowledge Act at TownHall Europe, Brussels! What to expect The European Union is spending massively on research and innovation. Horizon Europe has a budget of €95.5 billion, up from a cool €80 billion for its predecessor program, […]
Background Users are losing the ability to own copies of copyrighted materials. Today, many materials are only published in digital rather than analogue formats to the point that it has become much more difficult, if not impossible, to obtain movies, music or scientific publications in analogue formats. At the same time, publishers no longer sell […]
Today, COMMUNIA is releasing Policy Paper #21 on the right to license and own digital materials (also available as a PDF file), in which we highlight a crucial challenge that users face in the digital environment: the increasing inability to own digital copies of copyrighted material. Legacy physical formats, such as books, CDs and DVDs, […]
EU copyright law provides rights holders with powerful tools, in the form of exclusive rights and enforcement mechanisms, that allow them to control the dissemination of essential knowledge goods. In the digital ecosystem, rights holders can exercise these formally legitimate rights to segment access and restrict who can buy and license their digital works. This […]
This independent expert study, commissioned by COMMUNIA and Knowledge Rights 21 to Christophe Geiger Bernd and Justin Jütte, explores what positive obligations must be imposed on rightholders as a consequence of the rights users enjoy under copyright law, in particular in the light of the fundamental rights they are reflecting. A particular focus of the […]
This is the final blog post in our series on trends in national copyright policy following the DSM implementation. With the national processes finalised in all Member States, we have analysed the transpositions to understand the impact of our proposals, identify areas of convergence and divergence, and assess how those affect the position of users […]
Poland has been waiting for the implementation of the CDSM Directive into national law for almost 5 years. During this time some early implementation projects appeared, and in 2022 public consultations were conducted, after which things went quiet. After winning the elections in October 2023, the new ruling coalition embarked on another attempt to regulate […]
