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COMMUNIA Association for the Public Domain

COMMUNIA advocates for policies that expand the public domain and increase access to and reuse of culture and knowledge.

Lobbying Activity

Meeting with Emmanuelle Du Chalard (Head of Unit Communications Networks, Content and Technology)

9 Oct 2025 · Exchange of views on the implementation of copyright rules related to research and cultural heritage

Meeting with Michael Arentoft (Head of Unit Research and Innovation)

8 Oct 2025 · Current developments and next steps in the context of the upcoming ERA Act.

Response to European Research Area (ERA) Act

10 Sept 2025

COMMUNIA strongly supports the completion of the European Research Area (ERA), where researchers, knowledge, and technology can circulate freely. To achieve this goal, it is essential to address the remaining legal barriers that fragment the ERA and restrict the free flow of scientific knowledge. Our contribution focuses on copyright-related obstacles that undermine European research, innovation, and competitiveness. Two issues in particular stand out: (1) access to and reuse of publicly funded research results and (2) access to and reuse of research resources. 1. Access to and reuse of publicly funded research results Despite significant public investment in research, access to results remains prohibitively expensive. Too many publications end up behind paywalls, excluding large parts of the research community and the public, and slowing scientific progress. This forces European taxpayers to pay twiceonce for funding the research and again for access to the outputs. To remedy this, the ERA Act should introduce an EU-wide secondary publishing right that protects authors and ensures open access to their work, regardless of contractual obligations towards publishers. Unlike existing fragmented national laws, this right should apply uniformly across the EU, cover the version of record, and be free from embargo periods. We also recommend against implementing public funding thresholds. Going further, an EU-wide secondary publication obligation would ensure systematic deposit of research outputs in open access repositories. Under such an obligation, research-performing organisations could take responsibility for compliance, reducing the burden on individual authors. Given the scale of public investment in research and the strong public interest in accessibility, such an obligation is a reasonable and proportionate measure. 2. Access to and reuse of research resources Researchers often face legal restrictions when copying and sharing research resources, even with collaborators in other EU countries. This is particularly problematic for EU-funded projects that span multiple Member States and often involve international partners. Current research exceptions in EU copyright law are outdated, fragmented, and ill-suited to digital, cross-border collaboration. The ERA Act should therefore introduce a mandatory, flexible, and technologically neutral research exception that applies horizontally to all types of protected works. This exception should cover both reproduction and communication to the public (including making available online). Importantly, it must be protected against contractual override and it must be ensured that the exception cannot be undermined by technological protection measures. Furthermore, it should be covered by public international law protections, to prevent choice-of-law agreements from overriding it. This would ensure that research consortia across Member States can collaborate effectively without copyright barriers. It would also enable researchers to share resources for replication and verificationfundamental to the integrity of science. Finally, the current requirement that research exceptions apply only to non-commercial purposes creates unnecessary barriers, especially in public-private partnerships and other collaborations with industry. We therefore recommend eliminating the non-commercial purpose requirement for institutional research. Research uses outside of an institutional context shall benefit from the same exception, provided that the purposes are not directly commercial. We believe these measures are essential to overcoming copyright-related barriers, fostering deeper European research collaboration, and enhancing Europes global competitiveness. Incorporating them into the ERA Act would be a decisive step toward realising the Fifth Freedom. More detailed proposals are set out in the annex.
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Meeting with David Cormand (Member of the European Parliament, Shadow rapporteur)

26 Jun 2025 · Copyright/authors’ rights and broader Intellectual Property Policy

Response to Assessment of the effects of the Recommendation on combating online piracy of sports and other live events

26 May 2025

COMMUNIA is an international association incorporated under Belgian law that advocates for policies that expand the Public Domain and increase access to and reuse of culture and knowledge. In our contribution, we thus focus on users rights considerations. COMMUNIA acknowledges the challenge that online piracy of sports and other live events poses to the legitimate interests of rightholders and other affected parties. As stated in the Recommendation, the main value of most live sports events lies in the exploitation during the live transmission and ends when the event ends. Therefore, unauthorised retransmissions of live sports events can cause significant loss in revenue for both sports event organisers and broadcasters and thus undermine the viability of the services they offer. We recognise that the time sensitivity of the product imposes an urgency in the enforcement of copyright and other affected rights. From our perspective, there is no shortage of tools available for enforcement. The Recommendation provides an overview of appropriate and proportionate measures that are available to the Member States, national authorities, rightsholders and providers of intermediary services under the EU legal framework to combat unauthorised retransmissions of sports and other live events. This includes far-reaching measures, such as the blocking of websites. Member States have the possibility and are encouraged to provide for injunctions against operators of unauthorised retransmissions as well as against providers of intermediary services whose services are misused for unauthorised retransmissions. Such injunctions typically consist in blocking access to the internet location (as identified by its URL, domain or IP) where an illegal retransmission can be accessed. While blocking an internet location may be justified in certain cases, every such decision presupposes careful examination and the existence of due-process mechanisms (including the possibility to appeal). Especially less fine-grained blocking techniques, such as domain and IP-based blocking, carry the risk of overblocking, i.e. restricting access to legal content, which raises concerns for Charter rights, such as freedom of expression and information. The Digital Services Act provides for a procedural framework that contains safeguards to minimise these risks. At least one Member State Italy has adopted legislation that goes far beyond the Recommendation with severe implications for the enjoyment of fundamental rights. Under the Italian Piracy Shield, rightsholders may report websites hosting unauthorised retransmissions to the national authority AGCOM, which can order Italian internet service providers to block access to the reported site within 30 minutes. The Italian approach lacks such safeguards and has led to problematic results. Two examples stand out. In February 2024, a Cloudflare IP address was blocked through the Piracy Shield, leading to the blocking of many thousand websites with no relation to pirated content. Later that year, in October, Google Drive was blocked for more than 12 hours, severely impacting many regular users and businesses. These are clear instances of overblocking that highlight the disproportionate impact of far-reaching measures without sufficient procedural safeguards. For this reason, we urge the Commission to not only consider the economic impact of the Recommendation, but to also assess the fundamental rights impact of measures to combat online piracy. To improve the enforcement of copyright and other property rights, Member States can be encouraged to exhaust the possibilities that exist under the current legal framework while implementing procedural safeguards to minimise the risk of overblocking.
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Response to EU Start-up and Scale-up Strategy

17 Mar 2025

COMMUNIA is an international association incorporated under Belgian law that advocates for policies that expand the Public Domain and increase access to and reuse of culture and knowledge. It acts as a network of like-minded activists, researchers and practitioners based in Europe and the United States who seek to limit the scope of exclusive copyright to sensible proportions that do not place unnecessary restrictions on access and use. Do you agree that startups and/or scaleups face the hurdles identified in this document (access to finance, regulatory and bureaucratic burdens and fragmentation, access to markets, access to talent, and access to infrastructure, knowledge and services)? Due to COMMUNIAs focus on access to knowledge, in our contribution, we will focus on this issue, outlining specific barriers to access to knowledge that apply to start-ups and scale-ups as well as the research sector, which is the backbone of Europes innovation system. In general, we agree with the assessment that access to knowledge is a major obstacle to research and innovation in the EU. We identify two copyright-related issues in particular that prevent European researchers as well as the private sector from fully unlocking their potential, (a) access issues to research results, even for publicly funded research, and (b) issues created by non-commercial requirements for research across multiple parts of the European copyright acquis: Despite the fact that much of the EUs research is publicly funded, in many cases through the EUs own Horizon Europe programme, not all published research results are available to all European researchers, let alone innovators in the private sector. Where there are no strong open access requirements, research publications often end up locked behind paywalls, drastically limiting their impact and slowing down European innovation. A number of exceptions in the EU copyright framework for the benefit of research are strictly limited to non-commercial research, which drastically limits their usability where private research funding is involved. This issue has been highlighted at length in the report Improving access to and reuse of research results, publications and data for scientific purposes commissioned and released by the European Commission in 2024. While this is not the only issue with these laws in the context of research, it greatly reduces the usefulness of Article 5(3)(a) of the InfoSoc Directive (2001/29/EC) and Articles 6(2)(b) and 9(b) of the Database Directive (96/9/EC). 2. Are there any additional hurdles faced by startups and/or scaleups? A number of Member States have laws in place that limit access to or reuse of important materials, such as public sector documents, public speeches, public data and databases, or cultural heritage, further hampering research and innovation. 3. What actions do you think the EU and/or its Member States should take to address these hurdles? As argued in the Letta report, the existing four freedoms of the EU Single Market should be complemented by a fifth freedom for research, innovation, data, competences, knowledge and education. The ERA Act provides a first opportunity to take steps in this direction by introducing a number of concrete measures that would facilitate access to knowledge and increase legal certainty for researchers and private sector innovators: The EU should introduce an EU-wide secondary publishing right that, among other things, applies to all research outputs that are at least partially publicly funded and allows open access publication covering all types of uses (i.e. is not limited to non-commercial uses). The EU should introduce a fully harmonised, mandatory and general copyright exception for research. The EU should consider relaxing the non-commercial requirements in the copyright acquis to increase legal certainty for researchers who receive mixed funding or work in the context of public-private partnerships.
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Response to Evaluation of the Geo-blocking Regulation

10 Mar 2025

COMMUNIA is an international association incorporated under Belgian law that advocates for policies that expand the Public Domain and increase access to and reuse of culture and knowledge. It acts as a network of like-minded activists, researchers and practitioners based in Europe and the United States who seek to limit the scope of exclusive copyright to sensible proportions that do not place unnecessary restrictions on access and use. Our contribution addresses only the exception for audiovisual services and its consequences for the provision of access to and use of copyright protected works or other protected subject matter. The exception for audiovisual services in the Geo-blocking Regulation is at odds with the core principles of the Common Market and the European idea. It also contradicts the European Commissions own stated aim to empower European citizens to enjoy seamless and interactive experiences, letting them access any content from anywhere in Europe. In the current market, the vast majority of audiovisual content produced within the EU remains unavailable to most EU citizens. As reported in the first short term review of the Regulation, as of 2020, European consumers on average had access to only 14% of the films available online in the EU. In some Member States, these numbers were much lower, with consumers in Greece only having access to 1.3% of all the titles in all Member States. This is problematic for a number of reasons: Access to audiovisual content produced within the EU varies markedly from member state to member state, which goes against the shop-like-a-local principle and raises concerns with regard to freedom of expression and information. It punishes European citizens who make use of their freedom of movement and permanently live in another Member State, as they are often cut off from a considerable proportion of the cultural production of their country of origin. Where public funding is involved in the production or distribution of a work European funding in particular it is particularly hard to justify why this content will not be available to all EU citizens under similar conditions. The status quo prevents creators from reaching their entire potential audience. Article 9(2) of the Geo-blocking Regulation states that the evaluation of the legislation should particularly focus on the question of its application to electronically supplied services the main feature of which is the provision of access to and use of copyright protected works or other protected subject matter [...]. Therefore, in the upcoming review, the Commission should consider broadening the scope of the regulation to include audiovisual services for the provision of works, such as news and current affairs programmes, audiovisual and radio productions as well cinematographic works. At a minimum, the Commission should consider broadening the application of the regulation to works that were fully or partially funded by the public. Works that have received European funding in particular should be made as widely available as possible, and there should be no discrimination based on the place of residence or establishment of the customer. By the same token, AV productions funded or co-funded by the Creative Europe MEDIA programme should not be subject to geo-blocking, as requested by the IMCO Committee at the end of the last term. Finally, the Commission should consider implementing pilot projects from the stakeholder dialogue to improve cross-border access to audiovisual works. In September 2022, we had put forward a proposal to set up a fallback transactional video on demand (TVOD) service for publicly funded audiovisual works (https://communia-association.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/09/220923Proposal-for-a-fallback-TVOD-service.pdf). Such a platform would be a first step towards improving access to audiovisual content for European consumers without any harm to the existing territorial licensing model.
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Meeting with Emmanuelle Du Chalard (Head of Unit Communications Networks, Content and Technology)

13 Feb 2025 · Exchange of views on copyright and access to knowledge

Meeting with Alexandra Geese (Member of the European Parliament) and Friedrich-Ebert-Stiftung and Stichting Open Future

2 Oct 2024 · Event: Rebooting the Debate: Generative AI and Creative Work

Meeting with Daniel Attard (Member of the European Parliament) and TÜV-Verband e. V. and METREX Network of European Metropolitan Regions and Areas

27 Sept 2024 · Introductory Meeting

Meeting with Karlo Ressler (Member of the European Parliament)

25 Sept 2024 · Open access to information

Meeting with Aura Salla (Member of the European Parliament)

12 Sept 2024 · EU Research Policy

Meeting with Alexandra Geese (Member of the European Parliament)

21 Feb 2024 · Elections and next mandate work programme

Meeting with René Repasi (Member of the European Parliament, Rapporteur) and Herstellerverband Haus & Garten e.V.

18 Sept 2023 · Exchange of Views on the Right to Repair/ Recht auf Reparatur (R2R)

Meeting with Thierry Breton (Commissioner) and

22 Oct 2021 · Launch of the dialogue on availability and access to audio-visual content

Response to Declaration of Digital Principles

9 Jun 2021

COMMUNIA, the International Association for the Digital Public Domain, welcomes the fact that digital principles will be established as a key part of Europe’s current digital strategy, and will be supported by a joint, interinstitutional declaration. We agree that these principles can help strengthen the common understanding of a human-centred, secure and open digital environment, and shape the European way for the digital society. In this submission, we want to focus on how these digital principles can be applied to our particular field of expertise, which is the public domain in relation to copyright and other intellectual property rights.
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Response to Intellectual Property Action Plan

14 Aug 2020

Dear Madam/Sir, Please find attached the COMMUNIA's comments on the roadmap for the Commission's "Intellectual property action plan" Best regards, Paul Keller President, COMMUNIA association for the Public Domain
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Response to New competition tool

30 Jun 2020

The attached document contains a joint statement on behalf of a number of civil society organisations in response to the inception impact assessments on a new competition tool and an ex ante regulatory instrument of very large online platforms acting as gatekeepers. We are submitting the joint statement on behalf of the following organisations: Access Now ARTICLE 19 COMMUNIA association Centrum Cyfrowe Civil Liberties Union for Europe Civil Rights Defenders Creative Commons dataskydd.net Electronic Frontier Foundation European Digital Rights (EDRi) Global Forum for Media Development Homo Digitalis Idec - Brazilian Institute of Consumer Defense Open Knowledge Foundation OSEPI Panoptykon Foundation Privacy International Ranking Digital Rights Rights International Spain Xnet
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Response to Digital Services Act package: ex ante regulatory instrument of very large online platforms acting as gatekeepers

30 Jun 2020

The attached document contains a joint statement on behalf of a number of civil society organisations in response to the inception impact assessments on a new competition tool and an ex ante regulatory instrument of very large online platforms acting as gatekeepers. We are submitting the joint statement on behalf of the following organisations: Access Now ARTICLE 19 COMMUNIA association Centrum Cyfrowe Civil Liberties Union for Europe Civil Rights Defenders Creative Commons dataskydd.net Electronic Frontier Foundation European Digital Rights (EDRi) Global Forum for Media Development Homo Digitalis Idec - Brazilian Institute of Consumer Defense Open Knowledge Foundation OSEPI Panoptykon Foundation Privacy International Ranking Digital Rights Rights International Spain Xnet
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Response to Review of the Directive on the re-use of public sector information (Directive 2013/37/EU)

11 Jul 2018

Communia International Association on the Public Domain has been active in the discussion on the legal framework for access to and re-use of public sector information (PSI) in the EU for many years. In our position papers from 2012 and 2014 we spoke about the proposal to amend Directive 2003/98/EC. We also took part in the public consultation on the review of the PSI Directive (2017 PSI Review) conducted by the European Commission last year, both submitting our responses to the questionnaire and publishing a policy​ ​paper with our recommendations to strengthen access and re-use of PSI. COMMUNIA is pleased to see that the proposal to amend Directive on re-use of public sector information, which has been presented by the Commission on 25 of April 2018, includes most of the recommendations we made in our prior responses to consultations and policy analyses. We are especially glad to see the attempts to make more research data available, the extension of the scope to public undertakings (including transportation data), and further limiting the scenarios in which public entities may charge for data. COMMUNIA supports the proposal to amend Directive, but at the same time we want to draw attention to some issues where the proposal should be improved. Our detailed comments are available in the attached file.
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