Communia, the international association on the digital public domain
Communia, the European thematic network on the digital public domain, published 15 policy recommendations in May 2011 to strengthen the public domain in Europe and maximize economic, social and cultural impact. The Public Domain is understood as the wealth of information that is free from copyright barriers, including without limitation: – the Public Domain in its strict sense; – alternative forms of licensing for creative material (including, but not limited to, Creative Commons licenses, free and other open licenses); – open data in general (including open government data and public sector information); – open access to scientific publications and research results; – access to and re-use of cultural heritage; – issues related to models of production of “open knowledge”, including open business models, the working of online communities producing open content, etc. ; – management of works whose authors are unknown (i.e. orphan works). An international association is being created to continue part of the mission of the European network and contribute to a more balanced discussion about copyright in the digital environment. Planned activities are to educate and perform research on the digital public domain, though collective discussion and work led by thematic Working Groups on public sector information, glam (galleries, libraries, archives and museum) institutions, exceptions and limitations, etc. This presentation aims at presenting Communia objectives, get feedback from the audience and define possible common areas of collaboration and projects with OKF community.
by Melanie Dulong de Rosnay on July 1st at 18:30 in Track I
Melanie Dulong, a researcher at CNRS institute for communication sciences, is the legal project lead for Creative Commons France and a co-founder of Communia, the international association on the digital public domain. Her work currently focuses on open access policies, open licensing interoperability, scientific data, the public domain and cultural heritage. After receiving a PhD in law in 2007, she has been a fellow at the Berkman Center for Internet & Society of Harvard Law School, developing an open educational resource on copyright for librarians. She was also a fellow at Science Commons, working on open access science and open data policy. She was then a researcher at the Institute for Information Law of the University of Amsterdam, studying open content licensing incompatibility issues. She has been teaching copyright law and participating to research projects on distributed architectures, the public domain, legal metadata and ontologies, rights expression languages, e-science, e-publishing and open access, technical standardisation and music information retrieval.
Maarten Brinkerink works as a project manager at the Netherlands Institute for Sound and Vision R&D department. He holds an MA in New Media and Digital Culture and specializes in the distribution of cultural content using digital media. At Sound and Vision, Maarten manages innovative projects like Open Images (an open media platform), Oorlogsmonumenten in Beeld (a location-based iPhone app that enriches war monuments with audiovisual heritage) and Waisda? (a multiple award winning crowdsourcing game for collecting metadata for audiovisual content). Within COMMUNIA the European thematic network on the Digital Public Domain he led the working group on Memory Institutions (museums, libraries and archives). In his spare time Maarten is a board member of the Dutch Wikimedia Chapter , where he coordinates collaborations with GLAM-institutions (Galleries, Libraries, Archives and Museums).
Peter Troxler is an independent researcher and concept developer with an interest in the overall architecture and design of the social, technological and commercial aspects of enterprises, focusing on companies as permanent organizations and projects as temporary organizations. In addition to developing the organisational and interactional aspects of co-creation, he is also investigating how structural and societal conditions influence and are influenced by various forms of co-creation, one example being the current intellectual property and copyright regimes. Peter has worked as a research manager in knowledge management and technologies at the University of Aberdeen (Scotland, UK; 2001-2004) and he has been a researcher in industrial psychology at ETH Zurich (1993-1999). He also worked in business as a senior consultant for Akronym GmbH (since 1997) and for GEC Alsthom (now Areva T&D) as an industrial engineer (1988-1995). Next to his business and academic assignments, Peter has helped to initiate various interdisciplinary cultural and artistic projects where his contribution is in bridging the gap between culture and entrepreneurship. His interest in these projects were integrating arts, academia and media, and bringing about public involvement and public discourse.
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