Directive on certain permitted uses of orphan works adopted
On 25 October 2012, the Council adopted the Directive 2012/28/EU of the European Parliament and the Council on certain permitted uses of orphan works.
Orphan works are copyright works that are still protected under copyright, however, their authors cannot be identified. The directive requires the Member States to permit libraries, educational institutions, museums, archives, film and phonogram achieves as well as public-service broadcasting organizations to make those works available to the public and reproduce them with the purpose of digitalization, making available, indexing, cataloguing, preservation or restoration. Before a work or phonogram can be considered an orphan work, a diligent search for the right holders in the work or phonogram. The directive also sets the principle of mutual recognition of the status of the orphan work between Member States. The directive needs to be transposed into national legislation by 29 October 2014.
The French government has a new plan for Europe that could help the EU compete with the US tech giants: the digital commons.
The International Association of Library Associations and Institutions (IFLA), PAC Centre for digital preservation, hosted at the National Library of Poland is holding a series of 10 webinars on basic understanding of digitisation projects.
Communia, a non-governmental organisation that advocates for policies that expand the public domain and increase access to and reuse of culture and knowledge, issued twenty new copyright policy recommendations for the next decade.
The DSM Directive entered into force in June 2019 and the deadline for implementation expired on 7 June 2021. On 23 June 2021, the Commission launched multiple infringement procedures and sent letters of formal notice to Slovenia and 22 other Member States that had failed to notify it of the full transposition of the Directive. Slovenia remains among the 14 Member States against which the Commission is continuing the infringement procedure. On 19 May 2022, the Commission sent reasoned opinions to Belgium, Bulgaria, Cyprus, Denmark, Greece, France, Latvia, Poland, Portugal, Slovenia, Slovakia, Finland and Sweden.