digital media.[1] Another useful example is given by the project undertaken by the Italian Ministry of Culture entitled “Italian Digital Library”, which is designed to subsidise the digitisation of wide collections of ancient books, historical reviews and music sheets coming from some of the most prestigious Italian libraries and music academies, and to publish them on a freely accessible digital repository. Moreover, it is to be stressed that the EU recently undertook initiatives such as the Recommendation 2006/585/EC on the digitisation and online accessibility of cultural material and digital preservation.[2] This act of the EU recommends that, in full respect of copyright law, EU Member States encourage, develop and sponsor the digitisation and online accessibility of cultural materials such as books, journals, newspapers, photographs, museum objects, archival documents and audiovisual materials and create overviews of such digitisation in order to prevent duplication of efforts and promote collaboration and synergies at the European level. In addition to that, it is highly significant that the European Research Council—a European funding body, accountable to the EU, which was set up to support investigator-driven frontier research—issued a document which encouraged interested parties to reduce the current six-month gap between the time that research projects subsidised by the Council are published in subscription-only scientific journals and the time of their open access release on free web-based repositories.[3]
All these kinds of publicly-funded initiatives aimed at fostering the implementation of open access licences and building freely accessible archives of digital commons could be usefully developed with regard to freely accessible repositories of audio and audiovisual performances. The adoption of open access management of copyright-related rights on recordings which embody creative works in the public domain enables their immediate and legitimate incorporation into such repositories. If, for instance, educational institutions such as music academies and acting schools subsidised by public bodies were obliged or given an incentive to embrace these licensing models for the release of their most significant performances, this would have highly beneficial effects for the cultural
enrichment of society. From an economic point of view, it would make sense
