Posts tagged with: copyright for education

The day after tomorrow, the Legal Affairs (JURI) Committee will vote on Copyright in the Digital Single Market. The educational exception in the Directive is not what we hoped when the copyright reform process started. The European Commission promised – in its DSM strategy – to reduce differences between copyright regimes and to provide greater legal […]

Today, COMMUNIA launches the copyrightforeducation.eu website, asking for support for a better copyright for education. Let’s raise our voices and spread the word now, so that we can influence our legislators in creating a better copyright law for education. What you can find in our new website We believe in policy decisions that are based […]

In our capacity of permanent observers of the WIPO Standing Committee on Copyright and Related Rights, we have been attending the 36th session of the Committee, which is taking place in Geneva from 28 May to 1 June 2018. The following is the statement made by Teresa Nobre on our behalf on agenda item 7 (Limitations […]

We recently released our new report “Educational Licences in Europe”, where we analyzed 10 collective agreements in Finland, France, and the United Kingdom. This study shows that educational licences for using copyrighted content in schools include many terms and conditions that restrict users’ rights and that are unfair or unreasonable. While the small number of agreements analyzed […]

During the recent high-level conference on copyright in higher education, which we organized with the European Trade Union Committee for Education (ETUCE) and the European Federation of Education Employers (EFEE), we had the pleasure of hosting MEP Alex Voss. It was a rare opportunity for us to hear the rapporteur for the Copyright in the […]

MEP Axel Voss, rapporteur of the draft Directive on copyright in the Digital Single Market, did not expect this dossier to be so controversial. And issues relating to the educational sector are not an exception. With these words, the Eurodeputy began his speech at last week’s high-level conference, “A better copyright for quality higher education […]

Last week more than a hundred of copyright reform activists got together in Brussels for the the European Copyright Action Days to make it clear to EU lawmakers that the copyright reform effort that is currently being discussed in the European Parliament and the European Council is not good enough. In a series of events […]

The European Union is coming closer to approving a mandatory educational exception that may address some of the limitations copyright law places on everyday educational activities. However, the current proposal for a Directive on Copyright in the Digital Single Market would allow licences that are easily available in the market to take precedence over the […]

This is a guest post by Bernd Fiedler, policy manager at Wikimedia Deutschland. Bernd previously worked as a teacher and is aiming at improving the framework for free education. WMDE is a Communia member organisation. In the “Urheberrechts-Wissensgesellschafts-Gesetz” (engl. roughly: Copyright Knowledge-Society Act), the German legislator tries to improve the legal framework for educators and […]

We have been arguing for quite sometime now that handing out the power to define the scope of users rights to right holders – in the form of license agreements that they can (almost unilateral) draft and frame as they wish – is bad. Really bad: licenses fragment the legal framework that mandatory exceptions try […]