By public domain it is meant any content, metadata or other subject matter not protected by Intellectual Property Rights and/or subject to a waiver of Intellectual Property Rights (See: DEA, Art. 1 Definitions).

Europeana has worked with Creative Commons to develop a simple mark that indicates that a work is in the public domain - the Public Domain Mark (PDM). Note that PDM and CC0 Public Domain Dedication state different rights: PDM can be applied to objects that are not subject to copyright either because copyright has expired (e.g. the author died many years ago) or because the object was never subject to such rights and is therefore in the public domain; the Creative Commons CC0 1.0 Universal Public Domain Dedication can be applied to objects or data that is subject to copyright but where the rights holder wants to waive the rights and dedicate the object to the public domain. It can only be applied by the rights holder or someone who is authorised by the rights holder. CC0 is specifically designed for use with (meta) data sets and is unlikely to be used as a rights statement describing content. In the context of Europeana, CC0 is primarily used to ensure that metadata can be used without any restrictions. The CC0 waiver is automatically applied to all metadata that is being provided to Europeana.