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 […]
The purpose of copyright, at its very basic level, finds its normative implementation in the interplay between access to protected works and the protection of the moral and material interest of creators (see Geiger, 2017). The social contract of copyright, which main purpose is to realize a broader collective concern, the access of citizens to […]
