blog – information labs

Sweet Dreams Are Made of This: Three Features That Put a Child on the Bottom Line

September 3, 2026 | 9 mins read

For some background music when reading this post, we encourage you to (re)discover the Eurythmics performing “Sweet Dreams (Are Made of This)”. The previous post...

You Spin Me Round: Three Features Built to Keep a Child in the Loop

September 1, 2026 | 9 mins read

For some background music when reading this post, we encourage you to (re)discover Dead or Alive performing “You Spin Me Round (Like a Record)”. The...

Non, a Ban Is Not a Plan: France Struck Down the Ban, Meta Settled on Features

August 27, 2026 | 13 mins read

For some background music when reading this post, we encourage you to (re)discover Michel Polnareff’s “La poupée qui fait non”. France adopted its under-15 social...

Zero Knowledge, Full Record: Age Verification And The Infrastructure The Privacy Label Ignores

July 8, 2026 | 9 mins read

The “privacy-preserving age verification” label should be understood at two separate levels: on the one hand, it accurately describes a mechanism, yet on the other,...

Two Megaphones and an Empty Room: The Need to Write the Copyright Reform for the Empty Seats

July 1, 2026 | 9 mins read

The EU copyright review is being argued by two blocs of private interests. The party that will live with the result, the public, was never...

Ownership 2.0: A Gamer, a Librarian, and a Random Mum Walk Into a Bar…

June 24, 2026 | 8 mins read

A video gamer, a librarian, and a random mum walk into a bar. That could be the start of a great joke. Sadly, it is...

Brussels Revisits Copyright – Part 3: Why an Optional Research Exception Is No Exception at All

June 22, 2026 | 7 mins read

This is the third and final installment in a series analysing the European Commission’s current call for evidence on EU copyright rules. Part 1 examined...

Brussels Revisits Copyright – Part 2: Why Mandatory AI Licensing Is Not a Silver Bullet And Could Ricochet

June 17, 2026 | 6 mins read

This is the second installment in a three-part series analysing the European Commission’s current call for evidence on EU copyright rules. Part 1 examined live...

Brussels Revisits Copyright – Part 1: Why the Rush to Block Live Sports Piracy Threatens Fundamental Rights

June 15, 2026 | 9 mins read

This is the first installment in a three-part series analyzing the European Commission’s current call for evidence on EU copyright rules. This post focuses on...

Did IMCO Forget That Consumer Protection Is in Its DNA?

June 12, 2026 | 7 mins read

The IMCO draft opinion on the Digital Networks Act (DNA), reported by Euractiv and circulated after a Politico leak, takes the Commission’s already-imperfect proposal and...

“Panic First, Evidence Later”? Surely That’s Not How We Do It in the EU!

June 10, 2026 | 9 mins read

At a roundtable in early June that brought together children’s rights experts, child safety researchers, and policymakers, not a single researcher present expressed support for...

From Buzzword to Blueprint? The EU Tech Sovereignty Package Has Landed

June 4, 2026 | 12 mins read

A year ago, we argued that digital sovereignty was Europe’s favourite empty buzzword: elastic enough for everyone to project their fears onto, specific enough to...

The Commission Already Wears Too Many Hats. Now It Wants to Be a Standards Body Too?

June 1, 2026 | 11 mins read

On 2 June 2026, the Commission convenes its first stakeholder workshop on machine-readable opt-out protocols for AI training data, co-chaired by the Director of the...

It’s a Trap: Why Strengthening Copyright to Protect Creators Will Do The Opposite

May 27, 2026 | 10 mins read

Admiral Ackbar, the rebel commander from Return of the Jedi, is remembered for exactly one line: “It’s a trap.” The European Commission’s call for evidence...

Don’t Be Fooled: What Australia Calls a Social Media Delay Is Actually a Triple Ban

May 20, 2026 | 9 mins read

The word “delay” is doing a great deal of work right now. Not only in Australia, but also in Brussels. On 12 May 2026, European...

The Stories We Are Told About AI: Introducing the “AI: Tools or Gods?” Podcast

May 13, 2026 | 4 mins read

Every week, a new claim about artificial intelligence enters the public conversation. AI will take your job. AI will save democracy. AI is already smarter...

Zlonk! What a Los Angeles Jury Found That Fifty Years of Research Could Not – Part 3

May 6, 2026 | 6 mins read

This is Part 3 of a three-part series. Part 1 examined the five-century history of media moral panics and why the smartphone debate fits that...

Zap! What Television Programmers Invented and Silicon Valley Perfected – Part 2

April 29, 2026 | 9 mins read

This is Part 2 of a three-part series. Part 1 examined the five-century history of media moral panics and why the smartphone debate fits that...

Kapow! Batman, Robin, and the template of moral panic – part 1

April 22, 2026 | 8 mins read

This is Part 1 of a three-part series. Part 2 will examine how the engineering logic of television scheduling became the algorithmic logic of social...

Is a (Social Media) Ban a Plan? We Built a Repository to Find Out.

April 15, 2026 | 4 mins read

The question has been ricocheting around European policy corridors for over a year. Australia banned social media for under-16s. France, Austria, Spain, Denmark, and Norway...

Turkey’s Social Media Ban: a Familiar Playbook With a Troubling Subtext

April 8, 2026 | 5 mins read

Turkey’s parliament passed a law this week banning children under 15 from social media. Platforms including YouTube, TikTok, Facebook, and Instagram will be required to...

The DNA Attempts to Rewrite BEREC’s DNA: Net Neutrality Is the Sequence It Wants to Delete?

April 1, 2026 | 9 mins read

On 31 March, the Body of European Regulators for Electronic Communications (BEREC) held its 14th Stakeholder Forum in Brussels. The agenda was pleasant enough: working...

The Publisher Is Also a Data Broker. We Should Probably Talk About That.

March 25, 2026 | 12 mins read

Consider how a library works. You walk in. You go from shelf to shelf. You borrow. Nobody keeps records of what you read, once you...

You’ve Been Murdoched: Australia’s Teen Ban Offers a Warning for Europe

March 18, 2026 | 8 mins read

Originally published on Tech Policy Press On March 5, the European Commission convened the first closed-door meeting of its special panel on child safety online, opened by...

Still in the Wrong Lake: European Copyright Society Warns How Confused Vocabulary Could Make Bad Copyright Case Law

March 9, 2026 | 7 mins read

The dolphins are back. Or rather, they never left. In December, we tracked how Like Company v. Google Ireland Limited (Case C-250/25) had turned a...

Deepfakes Are Not a Copyright Problem. Stop Pretending They Are.

March 4, 2026 | 12 mins read

There is a thought experiment in legal philosophy about the drunk man and the lamp post. A man loses his keys in a dark alley...

Designed for Atoms, Broken for Bits: How Copyright Law is Locking Europe Out of Its Own Knowledge

February 25, 2026 | 8 mins read

Imagine inheriting a magnificent library. Shelves floor to ceiling. Rare manuscripts, out-of-print novels, decades of scientific journals. You are entrusted with it not as an...

Of Potatoes and Walls: A Generation Muted by Good Intentions

February 18, 2026 | 11 mins read

Last week, I found myself sitting around a table at the Lisbon Council, surrounded by policymakers, platform executives, children’s rights advocates and researchers, all wrestling...

The Quiet Burning of Our Digital Library

February 11, 2026 | 7 mins read

The story of the Library of Alexandria is often told as a catastrophe: flames, conquest, a single dramatic moment in which centuries of human knowledge...

European Policymakers and AI: Je T’aime… EUx Non Plus

February 4, 2026 | 6 mins read

Brussels has a peculiar brand of rhythm, one that sounds suspiciously like Serge Gainsbourg’s Je t’aime… moi non plus. On one hand, the European Union...

The Leather-Wrapped Village: Why Social Media Bans Miss the Point

January 28, 2026 | 8 mins read

The leather-wrapped village is expanding. Australia just tried to wrap the world in leather, and now France has taken its first major step to join...

The DNA’s “Voluntary” Counseling: How to Ruin a Happy Marriage…and the Internet

January 21, 2026 | 5 mins read

Picture a happy marriage. It might not be flawless, but it is functional. You have found your rhythm where chores are divided, bills are paid,...

Beyond the Ick: Public Domain Day 2026 and the Psychology of Closing the Commons

January 14, 2026 | 11 mins read

Tomorrow, January 15th, the Royal Library of Belgium will host the annual European Public Domain Day celebrations. Archivists, librarians, legal scholars, and open culture advocates...

India’s AI & Copyright Consultation: Why the Proposed Model Misses the Mark

December 22, 2025 | 7 mins read

Technology policy often struggles because of how problems are framed. Small definitional choices—about what a technology does, what a legal right protects, or where harm...

Building or Buying AI? What the TDM Debate Means for Europe

December 18, 2025 | 7 mins read

As Europe approaches the 2026 review of the Copyright Directive, we are making a choice that goes far beyond copyright. We are deciding whether Europe...

Brussels Effect 2.0: From Whistle to Workshop

December 16, 2025 | 6 mins read

For over a decade, the Brussels Effect has offered Europe a comforting narrative: that through the gravitational pull of its market, the EU shapes global...

From Monkeys to Dolphins: 2025, The Year Courts Hallucinated Copyright Infringement

December 12, 2025 | 6 mins read

As 2025 draws to a close, it is the perfect time to look back at the year’s defining legal copyright obsession: the struggle to define...

A Tale of Monkeys, Memorisation, and Misunderstandings

December 3, 2025 | 5 mins read

There is a famous thought experiment known as the Infinite Monkey Theorem. It suggests that if you give an infinite number of monkeys an infinite...

The Munich Mirage: Why the “GEMA vs. OpenAI” Verdict is Less About AI and More About Geography

November 26, 2025 | 6 mins read

If you have been following the tech headlines over the last weeks, you might believe that Generative AI in Europe just hit a brick wall....

The Empty Chair: Why Is Europe’s Public Knowledge Sector Being Ghosted?

November 19, 2025 | 5 mins read

This week, the European Union Intellectual Property Office (EUIPO) hosts its major “Conference on Copyright,” bringing together policymakers and industry leaders to navigate our “Evolving...

Shaping the Future of our Past with AI: “Humans of AI” and World Digital Preservation Day

November 5, 2025 | 4 mins read

This week at Information Labs, we are celebrating a powerful convergence. Yesterday, November 4th, we premiered the first episode of our new video series, Humans...

The Great AWS Outage: A 14-Hour Lesson in Fragility and the Folly of “Digital Sovereignty”

October 29, 2025 | 5 mins read

Monday 20 October wasn’t just another day; it was the day a significant chunk of the internet stumbled, tripped, and fell flat on its face....

Digital Sovereignty: Europe’s Favourite (Empty) Buzzword

October 22, 2025 | 8 mins read

Austria has kicked off the latest effort to define what “digital sovereignty” actually means for Europe. Vienna has shared the first draft of a non-binding...

AI Training and EU Copyright: Is It Legal? A Deep Dive into the TDM Exception

October 15, 2025 | 6 mins read

A central legal question in the discourse surrounding GenAI is whether training models on copyrighted data is lawful. At EU level, certain stakeholders are pushing...

The Hidden History: Why Modern Generative AI Is Older Than You Think

October 8, 2025 | 3 mins read

The recent explosion of tools like ChatGPT has fueled a narrative that GenAI is a sudden, recent phenomenon. This idea, however, is a “historical fiction”...

Beyond the Hype: Uncovering the True Scope of GenAI’s Impact

October 1, 2025 | 4 mins read

The current conversation around artificial intelligence is dominated by consumer-facing generative tools. This has led to a widespread belief that GenAI’s primary impact is on...

Is Technology Really in its Villain Era? Reflections from Gikii 2025 @ IVIR Amsterdam

September 24, 2025 | 5 mins read

There’s a certain magic to the Gikii conference, and this year’s gathering at the University of Amsterdam’s @Institute for Information Law (IViR) was no exception....

Walling Off the Web: How Cloudflare’s Plan to ‘Save’ Content Could Break the Internet

September 17, 2025 | 7 mins read

The economics of the open web are changing at a breathtaking pace. For two decades, the implicit bargain was simple: creators produce content, and in...

Anthropic’s $1.5 Billion Settlement: Not the AI Copyright Reckoning You Think It Is

September 8, 2025 | 6 mins read

You’ve probably seen the headlines: AI company Anthropic has agreed to a landmark $1.5 billion settlement with book authors and publishers. It’s been hailed as...

An Echo Chamber in Copenhagen: The Danish Presidency’s AI Conference Forgets Who Creates the Future

September 3, 2025 | 7 mins read

On September 18th, the Danish Presidency of the Council of the European Union will host a Conference on Copyright and Artificial Intelligence in Copenhagen. An...

☀️ Summer Reading Picks (August 2025): AI, Copyright, Deepfakes and Media in Transition

August 21, 2025 | 4 mins read

This month’s reading list underscores the messy but fascinating intersections of AI, copyright, and media economics. Taken together, these five pieces show how policy choices,...

July 30, 2025 | 9 mins read

This summer’s reading selection reveals a complex reality: we’re experiencing a fundamental rethinking of creativity itself, one that forces us to examine not just legal...

The Missing Money Trail: Why Article 15’s Story Hides a Democratic Failure

July 16, 2025 | 7 mins read

When European policymakers championed Article 15 of the Directive on Copyright in the Digital Single Market (DCDSM), they painted a compelling picture. Here was legislation...

#ProtectOurFutureMemory: Why Libraries Need Fair Contracts

July 9, 2025 | 8 mins read

information labs was proud to participate in the launch of the “Our Future Memory” campaign at LIBER 2025 in Lausanne, where library professionals, researchers, and...

Ceci n’est pas un Level Playing Field

July 2, 2025 | 7 mins read

In Magritte’s famous painting, a pipe is not a pipe. In Brussels today, a “level playing field” is not a level playing field. It is...

Don’t Blindly Blame the Bots: How AI Is Helping Journalism

June 25, 2025 | 8 mins read

Let’s face it: artificial intelligence (AI) has become the punching bag of choice in parts of the Brussels bubble, particularly in press-related discussions. From public...

Too Much, Too Little, Never Just Right? The Labelling Dilemma of Article 50 of the EU AI Act

June 18, 2025 | 5 mins read

Imagine scrolling through TikTok and encountering a hyperreal “person” doing a goofy dance with uncanny precision—only to discover it’s not a Veo 3 creation but...

Copyright, Creativity, and Generative AI: The Research Sector’s Missing Seat at the Policy Table

June 11, 2025 | 6 mins read

There is a longstanding tendency in policy debates to narrowly interpret “creative industries” as shorthand for music, film, and the performing arts. This tradition certainly...

Rethinking AI Regulation: What Europe Can Learn from Japan

June 4, 2025 | 4 mins read

In a world of headline-grabbing bans, sweeping fines, and regulatory manifestos, Japan has taken a quiet but revolutionary path toward AI governance. With the May...

Spinning Disruption: A History of Creative Industry Alarm Bells

May 28, 2025 | 7 mins read

The UK’s creative industries (and their counterparts across the globe) are, yet again, sounding the alarm. The new “threat”? Generative Artificial Intelligence. The campaign? “Make...

Network Neutrality Is Not a Given: Lessons from Germany for the EU’s Digital Future

May 21, 2025 | 4 mins read

The internet’s open architecture has been a cornerstone of innovation and free expression. However, this foundation is increasingly challenged by proposals allowing large telecomoperators (telcos)...

The AI Training Debate: Why Focusing on Copyright Is Missing the Point

May 19, 2025 | 4 mins read

As public debates rage over AI’s impact on creative industries, one critical misunderstanding keeps surfacing: the assumption that AI models consume and store entire copyrighted...

Science as Scapegoat? A Closer Look at the EUIPO’s Study on Generative AI and Copyright

May 14, 2025 | 5 mins read

The European Union Intellectual Property Office (EUIPO) has recently published an extensive study on generative AI from a copyright perspective. Prepared by the University of...

Creative Gridlock: Are Rightsholders Still Fighting the Last War?

May 9, 2025 | 6 mins read

In Brussels, a recent closed-door roundtable offered a glimpse into the growing rift between AI developers and Europe’s creative industries. Hosted under Chatham House rules,...

Read, Rethink, Reform: Why the UK Must Look Beyond Baseless Claims about Opt-Out in its AI & Copyright Thinking

May 7, 2025 | 2 mins read

What’s it About Contrary to claims iterated in responses to the UK AI & Copyright consultation by certain stakeholders that TDM opt-outs breach the Berne...

Echoes from the Archive: Why Preserving Our Past is Crucial to Building Our Future

April 30, 2025 | 6 mins read

In a quiet corner of the archival world, amid shelves lined with ageing reels, brittle shellac discs, and magnetic tapes, history is being rescued—one recording...

Skype’s Shutdown: A Reminder of Telcos’ War on VoIP and the Case for Net Neutrality

March 5, 2025 | 6 mins read

Microsoft’s announcement that it will shut down Skype in May 2025 marks the end of an era for Internet calling. The pioneering VoIP service changed...

Who Let the DOGE Out at the Mobile World Congress?

March 4, 2025 | 6 mins read

At this year’s Mobile World Congress (MWC) in Barcelona, Deutsche Telekom CEO Tim Höttges declared, “Europe needs its own DOGE.” No, this wasn’t a belated...

Fighting for the Future of the Open Internet: EU Net Neutrality is Fair Game at MWC

March 3, 2025 | 3 mins read

The Mobile World Congress (MWC) has arrived in Barcelona, and along with the usual fanfare of new devices and 5G talk, a renewed battle over...

Read, Rethink, Reform: Why a Strong TDM Exception for Research Matters Now More Than Ever

February 26, 2025 | 2 mins read

What’s it About A well-functioning text and data mining (TDM) exception is essential to AI-driven scientific research and education in Europe. However, as Dr. João...

Ghosts of Digital Policy: A Network Fees Christmas Carol

December 12, 2024 | 6 mins read

Brussels’ corridors of power lay shrouded in December fog, thick and grey. The Big Telcos, channelling Scrooge, shuffled through halls in feigned distress. To policymakers,...