Today, COMMUNIA is launching fivefixes.eu, a new campaign website setting out five targeted changes to EU copyright law that could deliver significant benefits for research and innovation in Europe.

Generative AI dominates the copyright debate. Yet policymakers must also address other persistent problems that prevent Europe’s knowledge ecosystem from reaching its full potential. With the public consultation on a potential initiative for a better copyright environment for European creativity and innovation now underway, our campaign highlights practical solutions to these barriers.

A competitive European economy depends on access to high-quality knowledge resources and legal certainty for those who use them. Today, restrictive copyright rules and unfair licensing practices too often stand in the way. Our campaign focuses on five issues:

1. Barriers to sharing research data: Researchers face restrictions on sharing data with collaborators or for purposes of validation.
2. Obstacles to open access: Researchers cannot always make their publications openly available, even when their work is publicly funded.
3. Unfair licensing terms: Knowledge institutions face contracts that arbitrarily restrict how digital resources can be used.
4. Fear of copyright liability: Legal uncertainty discourages knowledge institutions from making full use of the rights available to them.
5. Long-term sustainability: EU knowledge institutions that maintain public-interest information resources face loss of visibility and rising costs associated with AI-related activity, while receiving little or no compensation from the commercial deployment of AI systems.

These problems call for targeted legislative action. Five focused fixes could help researchers collaborate, make knowledge more accessible and enable knowledge institutions to fulfil their public mission.

Visit fivefixes.eu to explore our proposals for a stronger European knowledge ecosystem.

• #copyright
• #knowledge institutions
• #publicly funded research
• #research
• #research rights
• #secondary publication obligation
• #secondary publication right
• #Unfair licensing