Public Domain Day in Europe 2025

Author

Bart Magnus and Ellen Van Keer (meemoo), with additions to the COMMUNIA report (by Leander Nielbock and Camille Françoise).

Intro

New works enter the public domain every year as copyright protection – which lasts for up to 70 years after the author’s death in all EU countries – expires. This is the ideal material for heritage institutions to enable reuse. The annual Public Domain Day, co-organised by meemoo, provides the heritage sector with a platform to showcase their open collections and share recent achievements, best practices and future plans. The tenth edition, Public Domain Day in Europe, took place on 9 January 2025, at the Royal Library of Belgium (KBR), with partners from both home and abroad. We welcomed 80 attendees in person and around 40 online. You can experience the atmosphere with these photos from Sebastiaan Ter Burg!

Keynote

This anniversary edition kicked off with a keynote by Professor Séverine Dusollier, currently affiliated with the prestigious Sciences Po in Paris, but an alumnus of the Université Libre de Bruxelles and the University of Namur. As a true expert on the public domain, she introduced the complex field of public domain and copyright law. There are different ways to approach the public domain, and Dusollier advocated for a positive interpretation – focusing not on the absence of protection but on the opportunities for reuse it provides. She discussed territorial hurdles in our globalised information society when determining copyright protection duration, and highlighted the misuse of copyright frameworks to limit free reuse after the legal protection term.

Participants then had a choice between two simultaneous sessions: the Belgian or European track.

The Belgian track

The Belgian track focused on sector examples where public domain heritage material was made freely available for reuse. The programme also delved into specific reuse examples to inspire maximum public engagement with public domain material.

Watch the presentation:

KBR has a good habit of making an extra effort, at the beginning of each year, to open up digitised works that entered the public domain on January 1st. This happens not only on KBR’s own platforms, but also on Wikimedia Commons. Piet Janssens gave an overview of this year’s Wiki upload: it was about numismatics (257 works, 514 scans), musical scores (8 works, 340 scans, e.g. Flor Alpaerts), drawings (23 works, 23 scans), letters (20 works, 40 scans) and contemporary prints (106 works, 23,309 scans). The KBR also collaborated on other public activities around public domain works, such as exhibitions or a walk.

Bart Magnus explained recent activities around public domain material and the Wikimedia platforms at meemoo. Four artists whose work is featured on the art and heritage image database artinflanders.be entered the public domain this year: Adolphe Wansart, Victor Rousseau, Emmanuel Vierin and Jan de Smedt. The digital reproductions of 75 works that fell into the public domain in January were identified, made freely downloadable and uploaded to Wikimedia Commons. In honour of International Women’s Day, 45 images of public domain works by 15 female artists were uploaded to Wikimedia Commons earlier last year. Many images are now part of various Wikipedia pages. The ten most visited pages were viewed about 4,000 times between March and the end of December 2024. Also in 2024, with the help of an intern, a catch-up effort was made to upload 518 images of works that had long been in the public domain on Wikimedia Commons. The nine most visited Wikipedia pages featuring these images received more than 21,000 visitors in the second half of 2024.

Inge Huskens presented the project Belgian Distilleries as LOD (Linked Open Data) from the Hasselt Jenever Museum, where they structured (unstructured) information about more than 270 distilleries into Wikidata via a data profile and linked it with other sources. They also uploaded 147 collection images to Wikimedia Commons and held writing sessions to improve the visibility of Belgian distilleries on Wikipedia. And this was a success – but attendees also gained insight into the obstacles encountered along the way, as well as future plans.

Even though Rubens’ work has been in the public domain for centuries, the Rubenshuis still faced many obstacles in obtaining digital reproductions of the works, which are in collections of museums worldwide. Elise Gacoms and Saar Vandeweghe highlighted the main issues that hinder the free reuse of the works: on the one hand, unlawful copyright claims on (the digital reproductions of) the work, and on the other, sometimes exorbitant administrative costs to obtain high-resolution reproductions.

Locally, the Dilbeek Culture Platform got started with work by painter and former resident Jean Brusselmans, which has been in the public domain since 2024. In addition to a Brusselmans walk with panels displaying reproductions, they also organised an exhibition with both loans from public collections and works from private owners that are rarely, if ever, publicly displayed. These works will return to being private after the exhibition, but the local photographic club provided digital reproductions of the works and released them on Wikimedia Commons – ready for all kinds of reuse.

The copyright protection on Marc Sleen’s work is far from expired, as Sleen passed away less than 10 years ago. But the Marc Sleen Foundation, which manages the rights to Sleen’s oeuvre, decided to gradually release his work and characters for reuse from 2025 – a progressive decision intended to keep the Sleen heritage alive and well-known. The precise steps and conditions are explained on the foundation’s website.

The Belgian track concluded with the annual award ceremony of the Wiki Loves Heritage photo competition, organised by Wikimedia Belgium. The competition yielded no fewer than 2,382 photos from 61 different photographers. You can browse through the ten winning photos, traditionally announced by Geert Van Paemel, here.

The European track

Meanwhile, the English-language track delved into the public domain in Europe, which highlighted several ongoing European and international initiatives aimed at overcoming existing barriers. This session was also recorded: watch the videos on Europeana’s Vimeo account.

To start, the Europeana Copyright Community – specifically Brigitte Vézina and Maarten Zeinstrathe – launched the revised version of the Europeana Public Domain Charter. The previous version dated back to 2010 and was due for an update. The charter encourages heritage institutions to make public domain material as freely available as possible. The core philosophy remains intact, but the approach has become more active – a call to action, indeed.

Leander Nielbock from COMMUNIA discussed access to public sector documents and public speeches. These ‘public’ documents can be essential for the rule of law (legislation, judicial and administrative decisions), and are crucial for accountability and historical record-keeping. But there are legal restrictions on their access, such as copyright protection. Measures to address these shortcomings in current legislation should be included in a European Digital Knowledge Act.

Brigitte Vézina (Creative Commons) presented the TAROCH coalition (Towards a Recommendation on Open Cultural Heritage) –  an international collaboration working on a new UNESCO recommendation on open culture to be adopted by all UNESCO member states.

Paul Keller (Open Future Foundation) and Sebastiaan Posth (Liccium) introduced CommonsDB: an EU-funded pilot project aimed at developing a European register of public domain works and works with an open licence. The tool seeks to provide users with legal certainty and ease the often challenging task of determining the rights status of online content.

Harrie Temminck (European Union Intellectual Property Office, EUIPO) shared the work of the EUIPO around the public domain and the establishment of the EUIPO Copyright Knowledge Centre. This is part of the priority EUIPO has made of copyright for the coming years. They also provide efforts and services relevant to the cultural heritage sector, such as the portal for out-of-commerce works and a knowledge database.

Merete Sanderhoff (Statens Museum for Kunst, Copenhagen) and Jon Beck (Scan the World) called in remotely. They shared their experiences with creating and making 3D scans of public domain heritage objects (mainly old sculptures) freely available.

NivoPol from Le Deuxième Texte Association gave insight into their impressive work on gender equality in the project Forgotten Public Domain Women Writers. The platform they used is Wikisource, where digital editions of public domain works by female writers from French literary history are collaboratively created (in Hackathons) and made freely publicly accessible.

Daffyd Tudur (National Library of Wales) shared considerations and experiences around opening up (digitised) public domain works. It has been a long-term effort, where every little bit has helped. After more than ten years, they can clearly feel and measure the positive impact.

Finally, participants were introduced to Label Culture Libre (link in French), an initiative by Xavier Cailleau (Wikimedia France) which recognises cultural institutions that are leading the way in opening up public domain material.

>> Watch the recordings

Workshops

In the afternoon, there were two workshops:

• Maarten Zeinstra organised a workshop on the Public Domain Calculator on Outofcopyright.eu, with the aim of updating the decision trees. Participants discussed changes in European copyright legislation and explored whether they have a national impact on the protection duration.
• Francesca Farmer ( GLAM-E Lab, RAMM) held a workshop on a toolkit recently launched by the GLAM-E lab for smaller collection managers to identify public domain material in their digital collections and prepare it for publication on Wikimedia Commons.

Partners