The citations in this introduction have been extracted from The Public Domain Manifesto, which is reproduced in full later in this volume. The Manifesto was produced within the context of Communia, the European Thematic Network, which was funded by the European Commission.[1] The Communia project had several developments that were not initially planned in the grant agreement. At its beginning, neither the coordinators nor the members could have imagined the number and the nature of the activities, many of which went well beyond the scope of organizing conferences and publishing papers. As the project progressed, partners decided to work on a voluntary basis between conferences to perform public outreach.
The most emblematic output of the Communia project is The Public Domain Manifesto, which was translated in over twenty languages. In particular, it takes a broad definition of the public domain:
The public domain, as we understand it, is the wealth of information that is free from the barriers to access or reuse usually associated with copyright protection, either because it is free from any copyright protection or because the right holders have decided to remove these barriers. It is the basis of our self-understanding as expressed by our shared knowledge and culture. It is the raw material from which new knowledge is derived and new cultural works are created. The public domain acts as a protective mechanism that ensures that this raw material is available at its cost of reproduction—close to zero—and that all members of society can build upon it.
The Manifesto defines the public domain as including not only works for which copyright restrictions have expired, but also the space where copyright does not apply because the law foresees some exceptions and limitations. It also includes resources which are part of the commons, either because they were not subjected to copyright (such as facts, ideas, information and data) or because their authors decided to freely share them by publishing them under free and open licenses, such as Creative Commons licenses.
Another outcome of the project is that legal scholars changed their mind during the course of the almost four years of common work to define the nature of the public domain and how it could and should be protected. Librarians self-organized activities for the annual Public Domain Day which celebrates the books which have joined the public domain because
copyright restrictions have ended (more or less seventy years after the
- ↑ Communia’s project website is available at http://www.communia-project.eu; The Public Domain Manifesto is also available at http://www.publicdomainmanifesto.org.
