Official text of the Orphan Works Directive 2012/28/EU which allows orphan works within the EU to be digitised and distributed. However, the orphan work status can only be claimed after a thorough investigation in one EU state among libraries, archives, museums (LAMs), educational institutes, cinematographic heritage organisations and public broadcasting organisations.
Understandably, the Dutch heritage organisations have responded with a strong reaction to the directive, as it is to be expected that ‘a thorough search for rightsholders’ will take far too much time within a large digitisation project, even though the search is now only limited to one EU country. Within small scale digitisation projects the search per work is considered feasible. All the responses from the consultation concerning the draft Directive can be found here.