International Call to Copyright Rules Waiver for COVID-19
On Monday, 22 March 2021, more than 250 stakeholders held an online press conference where they first published a joint call for waiver of certain copyright barriers for prevention, containment and treatment of COVID-19 virus.
On 22 March at 14:00, more than 100 research and educational institutions, and more than 150 international academics and other experts first released a public statement, calling upon the World Trade Organisation (WTO) to temporarily suspend some of its copyright rules, which would help the prevention, containment and treatment of the COVID-19 virus. The statement signatories include also some of the world’s biggest library and education federations, representing over 1500 institutions and 30 million educators globally.
The statement in full is available here.
IPI and Communia are both signatories of the statement and support it fully.
The French government has a new plan for Europe that could help the EU compete with the US tech giants: the digital commons.
The International Association of Library Associations and Institutions (IFLA), PAC Centre for digital preservation, hosted at the National Library of Poland is holding a series of 10 webinars on basic understanding of digitisation projects.
Communia, a non-governmental organisation that advocates for policies that expand the public domain and increase access to and reuse of culture and knowledge, issued twenty new copyright policy recommendations for the next decade.
The DSM Directive entered into force in June 2019 and the deadline for implementation expired on 7 June 2021. On 23 June 2021, the Commission launched multiple infringement procedures and sent letters of formal notice to Slovenia and 22 other Member States that had failed to notify it of the full transposition of the Directive. Slovenia remains among the 14 Member States against which the Commission is continuing the infringement procedure. On 19 May 2022, the Commission sent reasoned opinions to Belgium, Bulgaria, Cyprus, Denmark, Greece, France, Latvia, Poland, Portugal, Slovenia, Slovakia, Finland and Sweden.