[pd-discuss] Summary of WG6 meeting in Turin, 1st July, 2010

[Jonathan Gray]

Below are some brief notes from our Communia WG6 meeting ('mapping the
public domain') in Turin on 1st July. These are also available at:

  http://okfnpad.org/communia-wg6-meetings

We will (connection permitting!) be taking live notes on the same link
at our next WG6 meeting in Amsterdam on Monday.

All the best,

Jonathan

### Summary of WG6 meeting in Turin, 1st July, 2010

Participants

  * Daniele Bourcier, CERSA-CNRS (France)
  * Primavera De Filippi, Primavera De Filippi (Italy)
  * Giancarlo Frosio, NEXA Center (Italy) / Duke University (USA)
  * Jonathan Gray, OKF (UK)
  * Jean-Claude Guédon, Université de Montréal (Canada)

Minutes

  * Discussion of how the final Communia report will be drafted.
  * ACTION: Giancarlo will send a draft structure of the report to the
main Communia members list.
  * There will be five main recommendations, including two
recommendations already submitted to the commission (which will be
reprinted).
  * ACTION: Giancarlo to resend the two existing recommendations to the list.
  * In addition to the main recommendations of the report will consist
of supporting material (evidence, arguments, and details of other
relevant initiatives) as well as a number of other more detailed
'minor recommendations'.
  * Linking to recent work such as Severine's study for WIPO.
  * Discussion of who the report is intended for. European commission
officials -- taking into account what they realistically can and
cannot do. Demonstrating an understanding of the various pressures on
the Commission is crucial to making the recommendations compelling.
  * PSI: beyond economic value in a narrow sense. Making sure to
mention this in the report -- as Communia has an opportunity to
encourage the Commission to broaden its evidence base in relation to
opening up PSI. E.g. mentioning potential benefits of open government
information which are not only related to market opportunities.
  * Including a more detailed annex/appendix on the public domain calculators.
  * Including the public domain manifesto in full. Making a
recommendation which incorporates key material from the manifesto.
  * Including discussion of what information is needed to do automated
calculation, and what information is currently available from sources
such as library catalogues.
  * Metadata on works from national bibliographies.
  * Thoughts or recommendations from work on the calculators regarding
the harmonisation of copyright laws in Europe.
  * Recommendation that the Commission does more to encourage member
states to realise and maximise the social and economic value of the
public domain by aiding the discovery of public domain works.
Recommending the commission supports pilots of automated discovery
tools in several countries.
  * Setting up a European level body which allows people to dedicate
works to the public domain. Maintaining a registry of works which have
been dedicated to the public domain.
  * Encouraging member states to undertake activities to promote a
positive conception of the public domain -- e.g. by releasing a small
number (50 or so?) of high-value public domain works (literary texts,
images, etc) and encouraging the public to reuse them.
  * Building on PD calculators to create an orphan work calculator?
  * Highlighting how aiding discovery of PD works fits in with other
EU initiatives. E.g. building digital research environment in the
humanities (e.g. new technologies to aid teaching and research),
digitising and publishing public domain works (e.g. Europeana), new
services to explore public domain works (e.g. Discovery project),
value to aid technological innovation and humanities research (e.g.
large reusable corpora for text mining, image recognition
technologies, natural language processing, machine automated
translation, etc).

-- 
Jonathan Gray

Community Coordinator
The Open Knowledge Foundation
http://blog.okfn.org

http://twitter.com/jwyg
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