MEPs and Council reached an informal deal to make publicly available across the EU those works (such as photos, films or poems) whose right holder cannot be found. Lidia Geringer de Oedenberg, the MEP responsible for the report in the EP, welcomed the deal as a first step towards harmonisation of copyright rules in the EU. The outcome will need final approval from the Committee on Legal Affairs, Parliament as a whole and in the Council.

Parliament and Council representatives reached an informal agreement on "orphan works". Today, digitising an orphan work can be difficult if not impossible, since in absence of the right holder there is no way to obtain permission to do so. The new legislation would allow everyone to access such "orphan works" and take forward the project of making Europe's cultural heritage available online. In May 2011, the Commission adopted a strategy to revamp the legal framework for Intellectual Property Rights.

The new regulation agreed would also protect institutions using orphan works from future copyright infringement claims, and thus avoid court cases like that in the US, in which a Google project to digitise and share all kinds of books, including orphan works, was blocked on the grounds that the orphan works question should be settled by legislation, not private agreements. On the other hand, MEPs highlighted that their representatives secured provisions to make it safer and easier for public institutions such as museums and libraries to search for and use orphan works.

A work would be deemed to be orphan if, after a "diligent" search made in good faith, it was not possible to identify or locate the copyright holder. MEPs agreed that the right holder should be entitled to put an end to the orphan status of a work at any time and claim an appropriate compensation for the use made out of it. Moreover, a work deemed to be "orphan" in any one Member State would be deemed as such throughout the EU. This would apply to any audiovisual or printed material, including a photograph or an illustration embedded in a book, published or broadcast in any EU country.