Earlier today, the European Parliament voted in favour of the Directive on common rules promoting the repair of goods. With this Directive, the EU aims to increase the level of consumer and environmental protection by encouraging consumers to repair defective products instead of replacing them. To that end, the proposal takes a number of important steps which include prohibiting contractual and technological practices that prevent the repair of goods and facilitating the access of professional repairers to technical documentation and spare parts. Unfortunately, the Directive fails to address o ..read more

In our capacity as accredited observers of the WIPO Standing Committee on Copyright and Related Rights (SCCR), we are attending the 45th session of the Committee, which is currently taking place in Geneva (April 15-19, 2024). We made the following statement regarding limitations and exceptions for educational and research institutions and for persons with other disabilities (Agenda Item 6): Dear Delegates, Many of us here today will remind you that knowledge institutions face many challenges when it comes to fulfilling their public interest missions in the digital environment. These hurdles ra ..read more

In our capacity as accredited observers of the WIPO Standing Committee on Copyright and Related Rights (SCCR), we are attending the 45th session of the Committee, which is currently taking place in Geneva (April 15-19, 2024). We made the following statement regarding the protection of Broadcasting Organizations (Agenda Item 4): Dear Delegates, The proposed broadcast treaty, in its current version, remains a threat to the Public Domain and usage rights, particularly when legal protection of broadcasters is shaped in the form of exclusive rights, on top of rights that apply to content. The right ..read more

Published research outputs often end up locked behind paywalls, unavailable to many researchers and the broader public, impeding scientific – and human – progress. Despite progress in the area of open science, research funded by the European public is no exception to this. In many cases, European taxpayers are essentially asked to pay up twice, once for funding the research and again for access to the final publication. One reason for this is the transfer of copyright ownership. To comply with contractual demands, researchers routinely outright transfer their economic exploitation rights to pu ..read more

On the 6th of March 2024, we were delighted to welcome a full house at our “Unlocking Knowledge Conference” at Town Hall Europe. At this event, we asked academics, civil society representatives and EU policymakers about the issues knowledge institutions and researchers still face when accessing and using copyrighted materials in their activities, particularly in their digital activities. COMMUNIA defends that the introduction of a targeted legislative instrument, a Digital Knowledge Act for Europe, covering the needs of knowledge institutions in the digital environment, would be the way forwar ..read more

The purpose of copyright, at its very basic level, finds its normative implementation in the interplay between access to protected works and the protection of the moral and material interest of creators (see Geiger, 2017). The social contract of copyright, which main purpose is to realize a broader collective concern, the access of citizens to science and culture (Geiger, 2013), lies in the approximation of the interests of rightholders and users. Unfortunately, this perspective has been long overshadowed in the EU by a traditional understanding of copyright as a system that grants exclusive ..read more

Poland has been waiting for the implementation of the CDSM Directive into national law for almost 5 years. During this time some early implementation projects appeared, and in 2022 public consultations were conducted, after which things went quiet. After winning the elections in October 2023, the new ruling coalition embarked on another attempt to regulate these issues. Currently, we are at the end of yet another round of public consultations. In this blogpost we gather the most important highlights regarding the new implementation project. The “Good” (which could still be better) In the CJEU ..read more

Access and use of public sector documents and political speeches are key to a thriving democracy and civil society as they ensure transparency and accountability. Furthermore, they provide society with important historical records about political decision making. Copyright and paywalls, however, can render access to these materials difficult or prohibitively expensive. Today, COMMUNIA is releasing a new policy paper #16 “on public sector documents and public speeches” (also available as a PDF file), in which we are proposing EU level solutions to guarantee access to an usability of these essen ..read more

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