Copyright office hours: a review of the Europeana Public Domain Charter

About the Europeana Public Domain Charter

The Europeana Public Domain Charter was primarily developed to encourage cultural heritage institutions to maintain the public domain status of cultural heritage in the digital realm, in particular in Europeana.eu. It did so by establishing the following:

‘The Public Domain is the material from which society derives knowledge and fashions new cultural works. Having a healthy and thriving Public Domain is essential to the social and economic well-being of society. Digitisation of Public Domain content does not create new rights over it: works that are in the Public Domain in analogue form continue to be in the Public Domain once they have been digitised’.

The Charter identifies various threats to this principle, and while we believe that the principle still stands, the challenges have evolved and new ones have arisen. In order for the Charter to stay relevant, these need to be evaluated, and brought into the scope of the Charter.

The review of the Europeana Public Domain Charter

The Article 14 Task Force initiated a review of the Europeana Public Domain Charter at the beginning of 2024. After various discussions within the Task Force and with the Copyright Community Steering Group, some initial insights were shared with participants at the 2024 Public Domain Day Event in Brussels.

In order to further collect feedback, a copyright office hours session was organised on 20 June 2024. During the session, Maarten Zeinstra (IP Squared) and Brigitte Vézina (Creative Commons), who are leading the review efforts, shared ‘new’ challenges identified, and evaluated the ones already foreseen in the Charter.

Participants were invited to share their views about current threats to the Public Domain, and some of the ideas shared are as follows:

• The economic or funding pressure on cultural heritage institutions continues to be present, and should be acknowledged amongst the challenges posing a threat to a healthy digital public domain. It is one of the aspects that makes some institutions want to limit the reuse of public domain material (even if it becomes clearer and clearer that selling digital reproductions is, in most cases, not a profitable business model). Cultural heritage institutions should be sufficiently funded so that the ‘loss’ of revenue streams through licensing is not perceived as a problem.

• New media types, in particular those that are complex, such as audiovisual or 3D files, are often shared in a quality that is not sufficiently high for the material to be effectively reused. While this is not a legal problem, it still hampers the enjoyment of the public domain.

• In practice, for public domain materials to be available, it also needs to be discoverable. For that, it is important that cultural heritage institutions can rely on a space that is not led by private interests, that clearly marks public domain material as such, and that facilitates connections across institutions and enhanced metadata. This should not be the only place where public domain material is available, given that it should circulate freely, but such a space should exist to ensure that public domain material is discoverable, usable and findable.

You can watch the full recording below!

Next steps

The Article 14 Task Force will process the feedback received, and prioritise future changes to the Charter needed for it to stay relevant. A new version of the Public Domain Charter should be available during the second half of 2024.

Follow the Europeana Copyright Community’s activities on X and join the Community if you are interested in hearing more about the review process and the results.

If you have any feedback, please contact copyright@europeana.eu.