A key policy document
The Public Domain Charter was developed by the Europeana Initiative in 2010. It sought to encourage cultural heritage institutions who shared their data with Europeana to maintain the public domain status of cultural heritage in the digital realm, in particular in Europeana.eu, and ensure that cultural heritage could be reused as widely as possible. It has since acted as a valuable, non-binding policy statement for the Europeana Initiative that helps ensure that there are as many reuse possibilities as possible for public domain material.
Why a review?
The text of the first version of the Public Domain Charter acknowledges the challenges faced when it was first drafted, such as public-private partnerships leading to conditions that limit the reuse of public domain material, and practices by cultural heritage institutions placing restrictions on the digital public domain. Even if some of these challenges remain, over the past years legislation has formally discouraged some of these practices.
At the same time, new challenges have arisen since the adoption of the Public Domain Charter, ranging from legal, technological and societal challenges. It is important to ensure that the Europeana Public Domain Charter’s principles and recommendations recognise and address them, so that it can continue to fulfil its function for the Europeana Initiative.
About the review process
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.
The 2025 Europeana Public Domain Charter
After an analysis of the 2010 Public Domain Charter and an understanding of the current challenges to the public domain, the reviewers considered that the Charter stood the test of time, with principles that still stand. A few modifications have been made.
First, a principle bringing attention to the role of cultural heritage institutions has been added to the three principles that were already recognised, and the language of the other principles has been slightly modified.
Second, the definition of the public domain has been unfolded and slightly expanded to bring clarity into the multiple ways in which information can be understood as being in the public domain.
Third, substantial additions have been made in the section formerly providing ‘guidelines for preserving the function of the Public Domain’. These have been turned into ‘actions’ in order to bring attention to the need for cultural heritage institutions to put certain measures in place. These include the need for cultural heritage institutions to advocate against attempts to reconstitute or obtain exclusive and/or undue control over public domain works; avoid entering into contracts that limit the reuse of public domain material; mark public domain materials systematically, rigorously and accurately; balance the public domain to other interests; and provide high quality and reusable reproductions and metadata, among others.
And last, the structure of the charter has been slightly modified, to start with a definition of the public domain, followed by a set of principles, guidelines, and background at the very end.
Find out more
We invite you to read the text of the 2025 Public Domain Charter, and the background material leading to it. If you have any input, or wish to support the translation of the 2025 public domain charter to your language, please reach out to copyright@europeana.eu.
