Thanks to a long and very thoughtful report by "Calimaq" in the always-interesting S.I.Lex blog, I have learned of an important conference held in Barcelona earlier this month on "Memory Institutions and the Public Domain." The conference was held under the auspices of Communia, "the European thematic network for the digital public domain." Many of the presentations and policy recommendations are available for download. I would particularly recommend this link, which contains abstracts and policy recommendations for most of the presentations.
Many of the presentations are descriptions of extensive digitization projects in archives and libraries. Digitization is carried out to enhance access to archival material (a point that comes across particularly strongly in the report on the digitization program of the Archives of the Crown of Aragon), yet copyright can often hamper the ability of archives to make material accessible.
Calimaq in his report on the meeting points out as well that the desire of repositories to generate revenue from digitized content can also limit the accessibility of the material. Few European institutions, he notes, place digitized reproductions in the public domain (as Cornell has recently done). Instead, it is private groups such as Wikimedia Commons and not libraries that are fostering free access to public domain material. He praises, therefore, the "Images for the Future" project in the Netherlands. The project has received 154 million Euros ($230 million US dollars!) to digitize and preserve the Netherlands' audiovisual and sound heritage. It is also apparently working with rights owners to generate a revenue stream that can help fund the project (something that is not clear from its web site), and at the same time offering a completely open product called Open Images, which today has 275 digitized newsreels that are available under Creative Commons licenses that foster reuse.
As I read through the presentations, I was struck both by the participants' desire to amend European copyright law and by their willingness to use collective rights management organizations and compulsory licensing as tools to support access to library material. The European experience (and the proposed Google Books settlement, which is form of compulsory licensing) may have much to teach us about managing content.
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