Cultural heritage institutions, such as museums, archives and libraries (CHIs) have struggled with copyright for more than two decades. While technology enables them to reach far bigger audiences and to make their collection available to the public in more meaningful ways, copyright limits what they can do. The core of the problem is that very often CHIs are not the rightsholders for the works that they host in their collections, and it is very labour intensive and costly for CHIs to clear these rights, especially when it comes to older works that are no longer commercially exploited by their rightsholders (or have never been commercially available at all). This has resulted in a situation where very little of the 20th century collection of Europe's libraries, archives and museums is available online. Cultural heritage institutions have been referring to this situation as the “20th century black hole.”

A mandatory EU-wide exception allowing CHIs to make their out-of-commerce works available online would be the ideal way to fix this situation. Europe's cultural heritage institutions need copyright rules that allow them to focus on their public mission of providing access to their collections. When it comes to copyrighted works in their collections that are no longer commercially exploited by their rightsholders (such as out of print books or out of circulation films)–or that have never been intended for commercial exploitation (such as political posters or pamphlets)–CHIs should be allowed to make these works available on their own non-commercial websites without having to obtain permission from the rightsholders.

The Commission's original proposal fell way short of this objective. Instead of proposing a robust exception, the Commission proposed a severely limited and overly-complicated licensing mechanism. Since then, both the Parliament and the Council have proposed substantial improvements to the Commission's text, most of which have been integrated into the final compromise. The compromise combines a less complicated licensing mechanism with an exception, which serves as a fall-back mechanism that operates in a situation where licensing is not available. In addition, Member States will also be able to introduce more comprehensive domestic licensing schemes. Taken together these provisions provide Europe's CHIs with a comprehensive solution to most of the copyright problems they are faced with when digitizing their collections. If adopted the Directive will be an important step forward for the cultural heritage sector, which has been struggling with these problems for more than 20 years.