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Copyright reform is one of the most vividly-discussed topics in European Union in last few weeks. After the leak of the European Commission’s communication, the political parties did not wait long to take a stand in the debate. Socialists and Democrats opted to listen instead of presenting their own ideas, and organized a conference on […]

Above is the Portrait of Richard Wagner by Cäsar Willich, one of the contested images. Yesterday the Wikimedia Foundation and Wikimedia Deutschland announced that they’re fighting a copyright infringement lawsuit brought by the Reiss Engelhorn Museum. The German museum is suing Wikimedia for publishing digital reproductions of public domain artworks from its collection on Wikipedia. The […]

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 […]

COMMUNIA has opened a new line of communication: copyright untangled where we discuss copyright and education. The aim of the series is to provide context on the state of play on copyright and education in the EU, while keeping it understandable for people who are not very familiar with copyright law, the legislative process or the […]

European copyright law reform enters its decisive phase. Changes will be proposed by the Commission in the coming months, and will determine the shape of European law for many years. Activists involved in copyright reform from across Europe met last week in Warsaw to discuss this subject. During the meeting we worked to expand the […]

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 […]

The recent infight between the world’s largest academic publishing company, Elsevier, and (soon: former) editors of one their journals over attempts to make the journal open access – that is, freely available online – demonstrates the potential power of editorial boards in shaping the digital future of academic publishing. The academic publishing system runs on […]

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 […]

The Creative Commons Summit, a bi-annual meeting of members of the CC network and friends of the Commons, took place in mid-October in Seoul, South Korea. One of the event’s tracks was devoted to copyright reform advocacy. The track was organised by member organisations of Communia, including Creative Commons. In 2013, during the previous CC […]

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 […]