Blog post by Stephen Wyber
Later today, Ursula von der Leyen will give her 2025 State of the Union speech. In line with much of the European Commission’s high-level communication, this seems set to focus in particular on questions around resilience, sovereignty, and competitiveness.
Central to Europe’s competitiveness is its ability to create and develop ideas and innovations that create new jobs and markets, drive productivity, and find effective responses to wider societal and environmental challenges. These, in turn, need researchers, educators, learners, and the libraries that support them to be enabled to pursue their goals.
However, until now, Europe’s approach to competitiveness has had a copyright blind-spot. While there has been an eagerness to take drastic action in some areas, for example, to halt or withdraw legislation focused on environmental or consumer concerns, the same cannot be said for copyright. This is despite the current copyright framework being far from well adapted to digital norms, and the fact that beyond Europe, better-suited models of copyright regulation exist.
Ahead of the State of the Union speech, this blog therefore looks at where this blind spot is most apparent, and how the Commission could work to correct this.
Research: A Priority but Still an Exception?
The Commission is to be commended for its broad focus on the need to support and invest in research. In addition to a change in Commissioners’ portfolios to place research alongside other key aspects of competitiveness, President von der Leyen has been ready to be the face of the Choose Europe for Science initiative.
Crucially, there is also now legislation in the pipeline which will focus on delivering on the Fifth Freedom – the freedom of movement of knowledge – in order to create a true European Research Area (ERA). We have gone from a situation where R&D was buried in a much wider portfolio to one where it is a first-row policy priority.
However, it remains far from certain that efforts to promote research will include a revision to the EU’s rules around what researchers can do with copyrighted materials that they need to copy, analyse and share as a matter of course. The rules we have now are restrictive and unclear, and are not even mandatory across the Single Market, leading to a patchwork of national provisions that distort R&D and hinder collaboration. Of course, the fact that something as vital to Europe’s future as scientific research is treated as an ‘exception’ (to copyright) is in itself perverse.
The upcoming ERA Act brings an opportunity to resolve this situation and reject those arguments that would place the economic monopolies held by the few ahead of the broader public interest in scientific, medical and societal advancement. KR21 believes Europe needs a mandatory, harmonised provision that reflects the way that research is done today.
Artificial Intelligence: Throwing It All Away?
AI provides a particularly strong case study. As we have already highlighted in a previous blog, the EU’s approach seems to be characterised by dual agendas.
On the one hand, there is a drive to boost the take-up of AI, including significant investments in infrastructure and creating datasets. At the same time, paradoxically these efforts make no reference at all to copyright, and the limiting effects of laws that prevent the use of legitimately acquired or accessed information for training, including in the context of collaborations.
On the other, driven by the entertainment industry efforts in the European Parliament and Council are going rather in the direction of tightening copyright law and policy to maximise control by rightholders over training, regardless of the consequences for AI development in Europe and the broader economy. Such moves will inevitably primarily penalise smaller (local) actors and chase training activities away from the continent.
The risk is that all of the EU’s work to realise the potential of AI is undone by a failure to stand up to the copyright industry’s lobbying. While there certainly are concerns about AI – ethical usage, privacy, a lack of competition, and more – copyright does not offer a meaningful solution for these issues. Furthermore, its use as a tool is likely to have a major negative influence on European research and competitiveness, and by copyright limiting what sector-specific models can train on, promote bias and poor model prediction.
The EU needs to take a comprehensive view of how to promote safe and helpful AI – this includes addressing the barriers that over-reaching copyright can create.
Single or Many: A More Nuanced Approach to Structural Reform
Looking beyond the specifics of upcoming (potential) legislation around research and AI, it is worth reflecting on how far Europe’s wider work on structural reform is affected by the role copyright plays in competitiveness.
For the moment, as we have previously underlined, the EU’s flagship work around the Single Market and Competitiveness has not yet integrated the logic of a Fifth Freedom into their work. Given the priority given to this from the top of the Commission, this seems like an anomaly.
Furthermore, there also continues to be an almost mechanical connection made between stronger intellectual property rights and competitiveness. This neglects the very different impacts that different rights play in the process of research and innovation, and so competitiveness.
As underlined in our webinar before the summer, we risk being in a situation where our approach to copyright is led entirely by the minority interests of the 4% of the economy (i.e. the size of the entertainment sector in the EU) that has established business models based on specific ways of exploiting it. Too often, this is at the expense of the other 96% of the economy (as well as the significant social and environmental dimensions to which it is hard to give a monetary value).
Indeed, as the experience of other countries has demonstrated, a more flexible approach to copyright is not a zero-sum game. There is plenty of evidence to show that structural – copyright – reforms necessary to enable research and innovation do not come at the cost of a dynamic creative sector.
A key step here would be to update the Commission’s approach to the European Semester to include a more nuanced approach to intellectual property, as well as to make sure that, as it reviews the EU’s wider acquis, it ensures that copyright does not escape attention.
Setting the Agenda
For all the reasons set out in this blog, a readiness to address the existing challenges that exist in Europe’s copyright laws – and to avoid adding new ones – will contribute to a more comprehensive approach to R&D, innovation, and competitiveness.
There will undoubtedly be opposition – the copyright industry is effective at mobilising voices to defend its business models, painting its concerns as the only ones that matter.
However, the job of policy-makers is to look beyond the interests and claims of any particular sector, and take decisions that benefit society as a whole. To do this, they cannot allow themselves blind spots.
Photo credit: EC President von der Leyen, (C) European Union, 2024 – Photographer: Jennifer Jacquemart (source)
10 September 2025
