Copyright raises relevant questions for those who work with or otherwise use digital cultural heritage: how do you legally share collections online and support their reuse? How can you deal with legal risk? How are legal and policy changes shaping this area?
The Europeana Initiative offers free, up-to-date and expert guidance, resources, standards, webinars and an active community for all professionals who work with copyright in the cultural heritage sector. Explore these below.
Information to help you to determine if and what rights exist in your collection items.
The list of our available rights statements, the related URIs and supporting information.
Information on how to identify rights statement for the data you share with Europeana.eu.
Guidance on rights statements and information on copyright for data partners and aggregators who share data with Europeana.
A set of tools and resources to support professionals dealing with copyright in the cultural heritage sector.
Discover information about out of commerce works.
These guidelines from the Europeana Copyright Community aim to to support best practice in copyright management in cultural heritage organisations.
This report explores the challenges faced by institutions and professionals in relation to copyright in the cultural heritage sector.
This document provides clarity on the objectives that Europeana works towards when it comes to copyright, aligned with the Europeana Strategy 2020-2025.
During the German Presidency of the Council of the European Union, Europeana held a conference to explore the copyright challenges the cultural heritage sector faces as it embraces its digital transformation. Read the report.
Explore the main messages that came out of a two day Presidency Event on the role of copyright in the digital transformation of the cultural heritage sector.
Discover how and why Europeana encourages you to open up collections for reuse.
This policy document highlights the importance of the public domain by establishing Europeana’s views for a healthy public domain.
This webinar shares perspectives on open access to heritage collections from practitioners, advocates and scholars.
We cultivate, curate and share knowledge around the topic of copyright in the cultural heritage sector.
This Working Group provides a space to exchange information and recommend approaches to successfully use the legal solution to make out of commerce works available online.
This event, organised collaboratively between Europeana, Creative Commons, Communia, Meemoo, KBR, Wikimedia Belgium and Wikimedia Europe, celebrates Public Domain Day in 2025.
This webinar focuses on exploring the copyright and licensing issues associated with clearing rights for online use of cultural heritage objects.
This webinar and panel discussion explores the different strategies that GLAMs follow to conduct rights research, and existing tools that can support this.
This session from Europeana 2020 highlights four initiatives from across Europe designed to support cultural heritage professionals dealing with copyright.
The out of commerce works ‘legal solution’ simplifies rights clearance, helping cultural heritage institutions to make materials from their collections that are not in commercial circulation available online. In some circumstances, it requires concluding a licence with a collective management organisation - Europeana Copyright looks into some of the conditions agreed so far.
In 2019, the Copyright in the Digital Single Market Directive allowed the analysis of large amounts of copyright-protected data through ‘text and data mining’ techniques, while giving rightsholders the possibility to refuse permission for their copyright-protected data to be mined. This ‘refusal’ is now being applied in practice by cultural heritage institutions. What legal and ethical questions does this raise?
