The development of digital technologies has brought new ways of protecting and disseminating cultural heritage. With digitization, access to cultural works is made possible to an unlimited number of individuals, while at the same time works are protected from degradation due to the passage of time. The latter is the central aim of cultural heritage digitization projects.
Digitization of a copyright protected work constitutes an infringement of the exclusive right of reproduction, while publication on the internet constitutes an infringement of the exclusive right to make it available to the public, unless prior authorization of the rightsholder is obtained. Since there is no open exception in the copyright legal framework of the European Union (EU) such as is the fair use in the United States of America (USA), it is necessary to "deactivate" the copyright for digitization projects to be legal. Clearing the rights for individual works is expensive and time-consuming, especially in mass digitization projects of cultural heritage. At the same time, many copyrighted works do not have a known author (i.e. orphan works) or are not commercially exploited (i.e. out-of-commerce works), which makes it impossible or significantly more difficult to obtain licenses.
To facilitate the cultural digitization projects, the EU has adopted several measures that have reshaped the copyright legal framework in recent years. This research contextualizes and analyzes these EU measures.
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