Posts tagged with: cultural heritage

The aim of this policy paper is to make policy recommendations for cultural institutions to preserve the Public Domain when using digitization services provided by private entities. This becomes particularly relevant in the context of the 2013 Public Sector Information (PSI) Directive which adds Museums, Libraries and Archives in the list of Public Sector Bodies (PSBs) […]

Last week the Bibliothèque nationale de France (BnF) concluded two new agreements with private companies to digitze over 70.000 old books, 200.000 sound recordings and other documents belonging (either partially or as a whole) to the public domain. While these public private partnerships enable the digitization of these works they also contain 10-year exclusive agreements […]

Messenger boy / The Library of Congress / No known copyright restrictions Last week the Communia Association submitted comments (PDF) to the United States Library of Congress’ Request for Information on the topic of Third Party Digitization Initiatives. To give a little bit of context, the Library of Congress is looking for contractors to digitize some […]

The UK Government has published a Government Policy Statement based on the recent Consultation on modernising Copyright held in the UK. The document summarizes the findings of the consultation and outlines policy actions that the UK government intends to take. The policy statement (pdf) covers three fields where the government intends to legislate: ‘Improvements to […]

The compromise text of the proposed orphan works directive is finally out. If nothing unexpected happens, this text should be what gets adopted later this year, what needs to be transposed into national legislation within 2 years from then, and what cultural heritage institutions that are confronted with hostage works need to deal with for […]

Information Sans Frontières (ISF), an alliance representing public cultural heritage institutions in Europe, has published a new position statement on the proposed Orphan Works directive. On 23 March the ISF reacted to the recent changes in the proposal that resulted from the ongoing negotiations between Council, Parliament and the Commission stating that it was “deeply […]

This post by Lucie Guibault was first published on the Kluwer Copyright Blog and is reproduced here with kind permission of the author. The Proposal for a Directive on certain permitted uses of orphan works, introduced in the European Parliament on 24 May 2011, has been following its merry way through the legislative meanders ever […]

Information Sans Frontières, a newly formed alliance from the library world (Europeana, JISC, LIBER and EBLIDA) has just released a memorandum on the proposed orphan works directive addressed to the Council of the European Union. The memorandum, backed by some of the the most obvious beneficiaries of the proposed directive is nevertheless highly of the […]

On the 28th of October the European Commission has adopted a recommendation on digitisation and digital preservation. This recommendation is following up on a similar recommendation from 2006. At the core of the recommendation is the request to the member states to step up their digitization efforts, pool their resources and involve private actors in […]

Works that have fallen into the public domain after their term of copyright protection has elapsed can be freely used by everybody. In theory that means that these works can be reused by anyone for any purpose which includes commercial exploitation. In theory the public domain status increases access to our shared knowledge and culture […]