On 1 June at 14:00 CEST, COMMUNIA will host an in-person event at TownHall Europe in Brussels exploring one of the most pressing challenges facing Europe’s knowledge ecosystem: how legal uncertainty around copyright affects research, libraries, and public-interest AI development. What to expect? Across Europe, universities, research organisations, libraries, and archives rely on copyrighted materials […]
Last year, Denmark introduced amendments to its Copyright Act granting copyright-like protection to individuals’ personal characteristics and digital imitations of performances. As we argued during the public consultation, while the objective of this initiative—to protect individuals and performing artists against AI-generated deepfakes—is commendable, copyright is not the appropriate legal framework to address these concerns. In […]
The plenary vote to adopt the own-initiative (INI) report initiated by Axel Voss brings to a close a process that began in June 2025. While many aspects of the report improved during the committee stage and the text itself does not have immediate legal consequences, the overall outcome remains disappointing. The report is still incoherent […]
On September 18, 2025, the Italian Senate definitively approved the country’s first comprehensive framework law on artificial intelligence (AI). The new law also reflects Italy’s commitment to aligning its domestic legal system with the EU Artificial Intelligence Act (Regulation (EU) 2024/1689), ensuring coherence between national rules and the emerging European regulatory framework. Law no. 132 […]
In June 2025, the Danish government together with a number of opposition parties jointly proposed the establishment of a safeguard against the sharing of digital imitations by amending the Copyright Act by introducing two protections: 1) A general protection against realistic digitally generated imitations of personal characteristics; and (2) An imitation protection for performing artists. […]
The EU General-Purpose AI Code of Practice is finally out (download the copyright chapter as a PDF file). The Code of Practice—drafted by independent experts with input from over 1,000 stakeholders—should have been ready “at the latest by 2 May 2025” (Article 56(9) AI Act). However, as a result of several stakeholders pushing back against […]
Today, COMMUNIA is releasing Policy Paper #22 against new exclusive rights for AI-generated outputs (also available as a PDF file), in which we present the case against the introduction of a sui generis or related right for AI-generated outputs that fall short of the standards of copyright protection. Generative AI has seen rapid mainstream adoption. […]
Last week we saw the first draft of the long-anticipated own-initiative report on copyright and generative artificial intelligence authored by Axel Voss for the JURI Committee (download as a PDF file). The report, which marks the third entry of the Committee’s recent push on the topic after a workshop and the release of a study […]
On May 12, COMMUNIA hosted an online Salon on the unfair practices that have become commonplace in licensing negotiations between rightholders and libraries in the public and academic sectors. The video recording is now available through Vimeo. To kick things off, COMMUNIA Legal Director Teresa Nobre presented our latest report, Unfair licensing practices: the library […]
This week, we released a new report detailing unfair practices in the licensing of digital resources to libraries (as a PDF file). This report describes contractual practices identified by licensing managers from public and academic libraries across Europe during a meeting organised by COMMUNIA under the Chatham House Rule. The report also contains clauses from […]
