The making of an ‘orphan’: cultural heritage digitization in the EU

Abstract

The digitization of 20th-century cultural heritage is severely restricted by the potential subsistence of copyright and related rights. The European Union has decidedly bet on the introduction of a copyright exception, through the Orphan Works Directive, which is deemed to be a tool to allow cultural institutions to digitize their collections of 19th and 20th century works, even when their copyright status is uncertain. Despite the emphasis which has surrounded its adoption, preliminary evidence shows that cultural institutions do not consider the scheme introduced by the Directive scalable and effective. In this article, we evaluate the impact of the permitted uses on the digitization process of cultural heritage that can be carried out by those cultural institutions that are beneficiaries of the exception and we focus on the interaction between private and public sector in the field.

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