July 2026

A copyright exception you cannot use is not really an exception.

That idea runs through the submission Internet Archive Europe (IAE) submitted to the European Commission this month. On 25 June, we responded to the Commission’s Call for Evidence on copyright, the review that will shape what users, libraries, archives and museums across Europe can do with digital materials for years to come.

The Commission asked for input on four areas. We answered each one, and we added a point the consultation left out: the basic rights memory institutions need to do their work online. Here is what we told them.

Protect the preservation work that the law already allows

European law already lets libraries, archives and research organisations mine text and data, including for training AI models, when the purpose is preservation or research. Lawmakers made a deliberate choice to protect that public-interest work without giving rightsholders a veto over it.

That protection is being quietly undone. Large rightsholders now apply blanket opt-outs, built for commercial AI, across the board. They draw no line between a company training a product and an archive preserving the record, and so they block the very preservation work the law set out to protect.

We asked the Commission to confirm what the Directive already implies: an opt-out designed for commercial use cannot override the preservation and research rights of cultural heritage institutions.

Tackle piracy without breaking the open web

Piracy of live events is a real problem. But the answer some governments have reached for does more harm than the problem it sets out to solve.

We pointed to two examples. Italy’s Piracy Shield blocks content so bluntly that the Commission itself wrote to Rome in 2025, finding the system out of step with fundamental rights. In Spain, courts have ordered VPN providers to block access in proceedings where those providers had no chance to speak, and ordinary websites get caught in the net.

These are enforcement tools built for commercial pirates, used without proper judicial oversight, and the damage falls on people and services that did nothing wrong. We asked the Commission to measure that damage before legislating further, and to rule out using live-event blocking against general, non-commercial websites.

One research exception, not twenty-seven

Right now, the EU’s research exception is optional. Member States have implemented it differently, leaving researchers facing 27 distinct legal environments and real barriers to working across borders. Publicly funded research often ends up locked behind the very paywalls the public already paid to overcome.

We backed a single, mandatory research exception across the EU, and a right for researchers to make publicly funded work openly available the moment it is published, with no embargo. Contracts and technical locks should not be allowed to override either.

The four rights every memory institution needs

The consultation’s four questions miss something larger. The Our Future Memory statement, which more than seventy organisations have now signed, including the International Federation of Library Associations and Institutions (IFLA) and the International Council on Archives (ICA), sets out four rights that libraries, archives, and museums need in the digital world: to collect, to preserve, to provide access, and to cooperate across borders. Today’s law falls short on all four.

Collect. No EU rule requires the deposit of born-digital and web-published material. Journalism, government records, and culture that exists only online are slipping out of the published record entirely. We asked for a common baseline for the legal deposit of digital materials.

Preserve. Current law allows institutions to copy works for preservation only if those works are already in their permanent collection. Most of the open web and most licensed content fall outside it. We called this the 21st-century black hole: material that exists today and will be gone tomorrow because no one holds the legal right to save it.

Provide access. Two old rules hold this back. One governs works that are no longer commercially available, where licensing can take two to four years, if it happens at all, leaving a century of out-of-print culture in limbo. The other still ties library access to physical terminals on the premises, with no route to secure remote access for readers who cannot travel. Both need fixing.

Cooperate. Libraries can lend to each other across borders on paper, but not in digital form. A researcher who cannot travel has no legal way to obtain a digital copy. We asked for a clear cross-border exception for the supply of digital documents between research and library institutions.

The gap we want closed

Across every one of these areas, the same pattern shows up. Exceptions exist in the law, but technical locks, one-sided contracts, and the fear of getting it wrong stop institutions from using them. Faced with legal risk, librarians and archivists hold back, and rights that look solid on paper quietly disappear.

The Commission has a real chance to close the gap between what the law says memory institutions can do and what they can actually do, day to day. We will continue to make that case as the review moves forward.

Read our full submission here and add your organisation’s voice to Our Future Memory at ourfuturememory.org.