What are the main differences between the US and EU legal systems when it comes to digitisation projects?
The main difference is the exceptions under which copyrighted works may be copied or digitised even when they do not have the rightholders consent to do so. In the EU, under the Copyright Directive of 2001 only those acts explicitly described in a closed list of exceptions are allowed, including digitisation by cultural institutions for non-commercial purposes. The US adopted, in its copyright law and jurisprudence, a somewhat more flexible approach that allows limited non-licensed citation or incorporation of copyrighted material in another author’s work without requiring permission from the rightholders when this is considered to be “fair use” (it should be noted that there is still a lot of litigation about the extent of what represents “fair use”). In addition, in the US, all works published before 1923 are deemed to be in the public domain, and can therefore be digitised freely. In the EU there is no such cut-off date and works published in the first decades of the 20th century or
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