The EU mandatory education exception assumes that education activities are carried out within dedicated educational institutions, whereas growing parts of learning, including life-long learning, are taking place outside of such institutions or in hybrid settings. Europe needs to take these realities into account by broadening the existing mandatory exception to copyright and other exclusive rights to facilitate all non-commercial educational activities, regardless of their institutional setting.
In August 2025, the Italian Competition Authority (Autorità Garante della Concorrenza e del Mercato) published a preliminary report of the findings of the IC57 – Scholastic Publishing Fact-Finding Investigation. Today, COMMUNIA made a submission in response to the preliminary report (available as a PDF file). COMMUNIA welcomes the the preliminary report, as it overlaps with […]
The EU heads of state or government came together for an informal meeting in Budapest last week to adopt the “Budapest Declaration on the New European Competitiveness Deal” with the goal to strengthen European competitiveness, develop common economic prosperity, and ensure the EU’s sovereignty and global influence. In the declaration, the Council commends the recent […]
This is the second entry to a series of blog posts highlighting the positive and negative trends in national copyright policy following the DSM implementation. We conducted a comparative analysis of the national implementations to understand the impact of our proposals, identify the areas where Member States have varied or converged, and evaluate whether these […]
COMMUNIA is part of a group of civil society organizations from all around the globe that promotes access to, and use of, knowledge, the Access to Knowledge or A2K Coalition. COMMUNIA has been a co-initiator of the A2K Coalition. Today, the A2K Coalition is launching its website with demands for education, research and cultural heritage. […]
This publication by COMMUNIA and Centrum Cyfrowe presents exploratory research in 7 European countries on teachers’ practices in remote education. The report aims to provide evidence on content usage that can help shape both copyright policies and programs that support the development and funding of public educational content and platforms. It is based on an […]
Educational licences for using copyrighted content in schools include many terms and conditions that restrict users’ rights and that are unfair or unreasonable. In this handout we highlight the 5 most questionable terms and conditions identified in the collective agreements analyzed in our study Educational Licenses in Europe.
In this handout we suggest measures for the consideration of EU lawmakers to avoid giving right holders the unilateral power to reshape the terms and conditions of educational uses, and spreading the disadvantages identified in our study Educational Licenses in Europe.
This study by Teresa Nobre demonstrates that educational licenses contain terms and conditions that are inherently disadvantageous to licensees, thus supporting the contention that subjugating educational rights to contractual arrangements is not advisable and is counterproductive. It analyses ten collective agreements for educational uses in force in Finland, France and the United Kingdom pertaining to […]
This report presents the findings of our qualitative study on the perception and application of copyright by school teachers. The study was conducted among thirty teachers in five countries: Estonia, France, the Netherlands, Germany and Poland, from November 2016 to January 2017. The report was authored by Tomasz Kasprzak, Olga Jurkowska, Alek Tarkowski.
Copyright Untangled is a series of factsheets about education and the copyright reform. Factsheet #1 explains What Copyright Has To Do with Education; #2 explains the ABC of Copyright Reform; #3 explains How to Convince Your Legislator; and #4 explains Important Questions About The EC Proposal.
