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 […]
Today, COMMUNIA releases Policy Paper #23 for a general scientific research exception (also available as a PDF file), advocating for a comprehensive overhaul of the copyright framework for research uses. The research exceptions in the EU copyright acquis are too limited in scope, not sufficiently harmonised, and display additional conceptual issues, preventing the realisation of […]
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 […]
Last week, the working group chairs in charge of developing the code of practice for providers of General Purpose AI models published the third draft of the code for comments and feedback. This is again a significant evolution of the language of the 2nd draft. And while there are some improvements on substance (especially for […]
Earlier this week, we submitted comments (available as a PDF file) to the UK Intellectual Property Office’s consultation on copyright and artificial intelligence (AI). Our contribution reflects COMMUNIA’s position that a general text and data (TDM) mining exception for scientific research is needed to enable any kind of research that relies on large amounts of […]
With all the hearings of Commissioners-designate in the books, we present to you our key insights for copyright policy. Unsurprisingly, copyright is only one among many concerns of von der Leyen’s second mandate. Nonetheless, it is a cross-cutting issue that will keep multiple members of her College busy. Two hearings stood out in particular: Ekaterina […]
This article was first published on the Open Future blog on October 10, 2024. Two weeks ago, the Landgericht Hamburg decided the case LAION vs Kneschke. The latter – a photographer – had sued LAION for including one of his pictures in the LAION-5B training data set, claiming that this amounted to copyright infringement. The […]
The European AI Office’s public consultation Future-Proof AI Act: Trustworthy General-Purpose AI wraps up tomorrow. This multi-stakeholder consultation is aimed at informing the drafting process of the first Code of Practice, which will detail the AI Act rules for providers of general-purpose AI models and general-purpose AI models with systemic risks. Earlier this month COMMUNIA […]
This article was first published on Kluwer Copyright Blog on February 20, 2024. When life gives you lemons, make lemonade. This must have been the key insight at the Polish Culture and National Heritage Ministry when the new administration took over and discovered that more than 2.5 years after the implementation deadline, Poland still had to […]
