Article 14 Task Force

The public domain brings value to society. Cultural heritage institutions safeguard public domain materials and have an opportunity to make them accessible to everyone and facilitate their reuse, while people have increased opportunities to remix and re-use existing content in the creation of new works.

The Europeana Iniatitive has long supported the public domain via the Public Domain Charter, and generally the openGLAM movement. However, many cultural heritage institutions’ policies do not reflect these same principles. Challenges still remain for institutions to ‘recognise’ the public domain status of cultural heritage materials. There are various reasons, sometimes related to funding, sometimes to an institutional mindset. This is reflected in the collections available through Europeana.eu, some of which contain content with inaccurate rights statements.

Article 14 of the CDSM Directive brings new opportunities to address this. However, an obligation (top-down) approach might not lead to the best results and we should continue to encourage cultural heritage institutions to open up and be mindful of their struggles.

In addition, Article 14 of the CDSM only touches on aspects of the public domain and digital cultural heritage; there are various areas related to the public domain that can be interesting to explore, including the boundaries between copyright and ethical reuse and digital cultural heritage laws limiting the reuse of public domain material.

Objectives

The objectives of this Task Force will be to:

1. Raise public awareness of both the letter and the spirit of Article 14 of the CDSM Directive and of relevant developments in relation to the public domain
2. Defend and promote the principles in the Europeana Public Domain Charter
3. Build the capacity and understanding of cultural heritage professionals in relation to Article 14
4. Encourage improvement in Europeana.eu rights statements so that they accurately reflect the public domain status of works
5. Support users in overcoming challenges to the use of public domain materials

The Task Force is under the responsibility of the Europeana Copyright Community.

This Task Force has developed an overview of Article 14 National Implementations which provides information about the specificities of how European Union member states and some European Economic Area countries have brought article 14 of the Copyright in the Digital Single Market (CDSM) Directive into their national legislation. It seeks to support legal practitioners, openGLAM activists and cultural heritage professionals in having a better understanding of the transposition of article 14 and its practical impact. Explore it on the Europeana Knowledge Base.