1. Communia and the European Public Domain Project: A Politics of the Public Domain
What am I then? Everything that I have seen, heard, and observed I have collected and exploited. My works have been nourished by countless different individuals, by innocent and wise ones, people of intelligence and dunces. Childhood, maturity, and old age all have brought me their thoughts, their perspectives on life. I have often reaped what others have sowed. My work is the work of a collective being that bears the name of Goethe.[1]
The following chapter is an amended version of the Final Report of the Communia Network on the Digital Public Domain. The Report was undertaken (i) to review the activities of Communia; (ii) to investigate the state of the digital public domain in Europe; and (iii) to recommend policy strategies for enhancing a healthy public domain and making digital content in Europe more accessible and usable. As a result, together with the review of the definition, value and role of the public domain, the chapter will examine the challenges and bottlenecks impinging on the public domain. In addition, it will discuss the opportunities that digitization and the Internet
revolution have been offering to the public domain as well as access to
- ↑ Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, cited in Martha Woodmansee and Peter Jaszi, “The Law of Text: Copyright in the Academy”, College English, 57 (1995), 769-87.
