Dutch National Library Gives Full Access to in Copyright Material

From the OpenGlam Blog:

The National Library of the Netherlands has made over the last years some great digitisation efforts. Amongst others, they have published their medieval manuscript collection and made their newspaper archive available under an open license. To make this material available they have to overcome many copyright issues. Their huge collection of material is created by many different authors. It can take years to track all the inheritors to ask for permission. For that reason they have experimented with an ‘opt-out’ model where they asked authors or inheritors to contact them when they did not want something to be published.
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However, because it was not posible to use one clear and open license, it remains rather unclear when a user has to ask the collective rights organisation for approval. As we have written before, it is very hard to define when a digitised work is being used commercially.

Much More in the Complete Article

Filed under: Libraries, National Libraries, News