On Monday the 25th of January COMMUNIA organized a Public Domain Day celebration at the European Parliament. The event, which focussed on showcasing creators who have chosen to donate their output to the public domain, was hosted by MEP Felix Reda. The following creators participated in the event and shared their experiences as input at […]

Recently, everybody has been busy discussing the question of whether the Diary of Anne Frank will enter (or by now, has entered) the public domain on January 1st this year (Answer: It’s complicated). Surprisingly, the discussions surrounding the copyright in Anne Frank’s writings may shed some light on another contentious copyright policy issue: text and […]

At the end of the last year COMMUNIA submitted its response to the European Commission’s public consultation on online platforms. While we have not hidden the fact that this particular consultation is deeply flawed in its approach (see here, here and here), we have nevertheless chosen to submit answers to some of the question raised […]

Yesterday, the European Commission published its long awaited communication on copyright. The document titled ‘Towards a modern, more European copyright framework‘ doesn’t contain many surprises, which is both due to the fact that it is largely identical to a draft version that was leaked at the beginning of November, and that the Commission has opted for […]

It is not often that we find ourselves in agreement with the copyright policy positions of government entities entrusted with maintaining the copyright rules. Given this it is somewhat of a rare find to discover the UK Intelllectual Property Office (IPO) has recently thrown its full weight behind our policy recommendation #5 (‘Digital reproductions of works […]

Last week we have pointed out our concerns about a number of copyright related questions buried deep inside the EU commission’s ongoing consultation on the ‘Regulatory environment for platforms, online intermediaries, data and cloud computing and the collaborative economy‘. Our main points were that the consultation does not adequately address the effects of regulatory measures […]

As part of its effort to build a digital single market and to modernise the European Copyright rules the European Commision is currently running an online consultation on the ‘Regulatory environment for platforms, online intermediaries, data and cloud computing and the collaborative economy‘. As the name suggests this consultation bundles an enormous amount of issues […]

On Tuesday the European Commission published a roadmap outlining the next steps in their effort to modernize the EU copyright rules. The (not entirely unexpected) main takeaway from this roadmap is that the Commission is retreating from its earlier announcement that it will present a comprehensive legislative proposal for copyright modernisation before the end of […]

Today, Europeana published an open letter to Commissioner Oettinger in which the directors of 29 major European cultural heritage institutions demand a reform of the European copyright rules that would allow their institutions to make more of their collections available online. This letter comes in response to the Commission’s intention to review parts of the […]

Over the last month the German publishers who are pushing for ancillary copyright for press publishers on the EU level have encountered two more setbacks in their attempts to turn the ancillary rights that they have in Germany into actual revenue. Freedom to link upheld First the Bundeskartellamt (the German competition authority) rejected claims made […]