Communia and the European Public Domain Project: A Politics of the Public Domain

Abstract

This 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 knowledge. Finally, general guidelines for a politics of the public domain will be drafted together with the sketching of a positive view of Europe with a stronger public domain. Each of the subjects discussed in this chapter are further developed and detailed in Annex II of the Communia Final Report.

Keywords: public domain, copyright, intellectual property, EU law, digitalization, networked economy, internet