Learning on ScreenThe Europeana Public Domain Charter
- Publisher
- Europeana
- Category
- Policy Documents
- Subject
- New Technology; Education; Arts; Museums; Archives
- Inactive
- No
- Description
- Europeana is an online archive funded by the EU that gives free access to 6 million digitised images, texts, sounds and videos held in European archives. The Europeana Foundation has published a policy statement, the Public Domain Charter, to highlight the value of public domain content in the knowledge economy. It alerts Europe’s museums, libraries, archives and audiovisual collections to the fact that digitisation of Public Domain content does not create new rights in it. Almost everything published, painted, photographed or released anywhere in the world before the 20th century is included in the Public Domain and all of it can be freely used and reinterpreted to fuel the creation of new cultural treasures. But now the Public Domain is in danger of being restricted by agreements to digitise Europe’s cultural heritage. These contracts sometimes include exclusive rights that restrict access to newly digitised works for years or even decades. Europeana believes that material held in trust for the public for generations, often at taxpayers’ expense, should not enter the private sector when it is digitised.
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