The 20th Century Black Hole

In a blog post published by Ariadna Matas (Europeana Foundation) and Maarten Zeinstra (Open Nederland), the two authors examine whether the out-of-commerce works solution has contributed to solving the 20th century black hole in Europeana collections.

The core issue is cultural heritage materials from 20th century remain severely underrepresented online compared to older or newer works and that’s known as the “20th century black hole”.

Since the 2019 CDSM Directive came into force, 2.7 million works have been registered, but 92 % of those come from just three countries — Slovakia, the Netherlands, and Czechia. Eleven EU member states have registered nothing at all, and growth has slowed significantly.

Three main reasons explain why the system is stalling. Negotiations with collective management organisations (CMOs) are often dragging on for years or collapsing entirely, with CMOs having little incentive to cooperate. Many works also have multiple layers of rights managed by different CMOs, creating legal complexity and multiple fees. On top of that, the stakeholder dialogues that the Directive required member states to set up have largely not taken place.

The proposed fix is to oblige CMOs to proactively offer clear, publicly available licensing conditions for out-of-commerce works, and if they fail to do so, cultural heritage institutions should be able to rely on a legal exception and proceed without a license.

You can read the full post here.