The European Commission’s public consultation on a neighbouring right for publishers and on the freedom of panorama closed on Wednesday. While the Commission has yet to publish the results of the consultation, Copyright 4 Creativity and Save the Link – who have both been providing tools that encouraged internet users to respond to the consultation […]

Yesterday the European Commission unveiled five more elements of its Digital Single Market Strategy. These consist of new e-commerce rules (including a legislative proposal to address unjustified geoblocking), updates to the EU audiovisual rules and ‘a targeted approach to online platforms‘. From the copyright perspective the geoblocking proposal and the communication on online platforms are […]

Last month the US Supreme Court refused to hear an appeal from US authors who attempted to overturn a prior decision that Google’s scanning of millions in copyright books amounted to “fair use”. This refusal marks the end of a decade long legal fight about the Google books project. This means that in the US […]

The Commission’s public consultation on the role of publishers in the copyright value chain and on the ‘panorama exception’ is addressed at a broad range of stakeholders, which includes both ‘Libraries/Cultural heritage institutions’ and ‘Educational or research institutions’. In this second post of our series on the consultation, we highlight what the introduction of an […]

The Commission is currently holding a public consultation on the role of publishers in the copyright value chain and on the ‘panorama exception’. Today we’re kicking off a short series of blog posts that will highlight the problematic nature of granting new copyrights for publishers, and why full freedom of panorama should be ensured for […]

Last week Politico published a leaked draft of the Commission’s forthcoming communication on Online Platforms in the Digital Single Market. As the the title suggests, this is another piece of the puzzle in the Commission’s attempt to create a European Digital Single Market. While it does not directly deal with copyright issues, the document discusses […]

It is relatively well documented that neither the French nor publishers are big fans of copyright reform. Given this, the comments from the CEO of the French publisher Hachette Livre on at last week’s London Book Fair are not entirely surprising.   Less than three weeks after the European Commission launched a consultation that appears […]

BEUC, the European Consumers Association, has just launched a campaign against geo blocking. COMMUNIA has been using this term mainly in order to refer to the practice of limiting access to copyright protected content – such as films or music – to specific national markets. This prevents internet users from outside of that market to […]

We spend a lot of effort pointing out that additional copyright, like rights for specific groups of rights holders, are a problematic concept that has potential to cause a lot of damage to the Public Domain. Most of our coverage has focused on efforts to establish an ancillary copyright for press publishers. We have seen […]

The European Commission is currently holding a consultation on the 2004 directive on the enforcement of intellectual property rights in the online environment (the so called IPRED directive). As the name suggests, this directive deals with the enforcement of copyright – including issues such as injunctions against internet service providers, internet blocking, and warning letters […]