Posts tagged with: cultural heritage

The Commission’s public consultation on the role of publishers in the copyright value chain and on the ‘panorama exception’ is addressed at a broad range of stakeholders, which includes both ‘Libraries/Cultural heritage institutions’ and ‘Educational or research institutions’. In this second post of our series on the consultation, we highlight what the introduction of an […]

It is relatively well documented that neither the French nor publishers are big fans of copyright reform. Given this, the comments from the CEO of the French publisher Hachette Livre on at last week’s London Book Fair are not entirely surprising.   Less than three weeks after the European Commission launched a consultation that appears […]

In 2012 the European Parliament adopted the Directive on ‘certain permitted uses of orphan works by cultural heritage institutions’. The directive intends to fill the gap between the mission of cultural heritage institutions to share cultural works to citizens, and the complex, costly, and sometimes impossible task of locating rightsholders to get permission for online […]

Is it dangerous to take a public domain picture from Wikipedia and use it on your blog or print it on a T-shirt? Last week we wrote about a copyright case in Germany where several users of public domain pictures received letters from the lawyers of Mannheim’s Reiss-Engelhorn museum. The letters demanded payment for the […]

It is not often that we find ourselves in agreement with the copyright policy positions of government entities entrusted with maintaining the copyright rules. Given this it is somewhat of a rare find to discover the UK Intelllectual Property Office (IPO) has recently thrown its full weight behind our policy recommendation #5 (‘Digital reproductions of works […]

Above is the Portrait of Richard Wagner by Cäsar Willich, one of the contested images. Yesterday the Wikimedia Foundation and Wikimedia Deutschland announced that they’re fighting a copyright infringement lawsuit brought by the Reiss Engelhorn Museum. The German museum is suing Wikimedia for publishing digital reproductions of public domain artworks from its collection on Wikipedia. The […]

Today, Europeana published an open letter to Commissioner Oettinger in which the directors of 29 major European cultural heritage institutions demand a reform of the European copyright rules that would allow their institutions to make more of their collections available online. This letter comes in response to the Commission’s intention to review parts of the […]

“We are calling for fair copyright that is fit for purpose and will benefit every European citizen” – that is the main message of the newly published manifesto, drafted by the Libraries and Archives Copyright Alliance (LACA), convened by the British Chartered Institute for Library and Information Professionals (CILIP). The London Manifesto is one more […]

Soon the most valuable digital works of art and culture may be available all around Europe, free of charge, licenses, watermarks, and in open, machine-readable formats.  Together with their metadata they can be used to not only promote rich heritage of our culture, but also to build innovative applications, web services and boost the creative […]

For those of us looking forward to copyright rules that enable European cultural heritage institutions to provide online access to their collections, two important things happened last week: on Wednesday 29th October, the Orphan Works directive (OW directive) came into force and on Saturday 1st November, the new European Commission headed by Jean-Claude Juncker assumed office. The first event […]