[pd-discuss] Notes from Communia Public Domain Calculators Meeting, Amsterdam, 12 July 2010

[Jonathan Gray]

Hi all,

Below are some notes from our recent Communia Working Group 6 meeting
in Amsterdam, on the public domain calculators and EU level policy
recommendations related to the public domain. Also added these notes
to:

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

They will mainly be of interest to those who were at the meeting, but
I hope they are also coherent for those who didn't attend and might be
interested in finding out what we were up to.

To those who were there: in particular note the action items at the bottom! ;-)

All the best,

Jonathan

## Communia Working Group 6 Meeting, Amsterdam, 12 July 2010

### Agenda

  * Public Domain Calculators
    * Review of work so far
    * Issues for discussion
    * Planning / future / policy
  * Communia Recommendations
    * Main recommendations
    * Minor recommendations
    * Appendices for the final report

### Meeting summary

We started the meeting by going over what happened at the last WG6
meeting in Turin for those who weren't able to make it. Then we went
on to look at work on the public domain calculators that had been
undertaken by IVIR as part of the Europeana project. IVIR aim to have
30 calculators completed by June 2011.

We discussed several generic (i.e. non-jurisdiction specific) issues
with the work that they have done so far, such as

  * The ordering of questions that need to be asked to establish
whether or not a given work is in the public domain.
  * Do we include databases in the flow diagrams?
  * What relevant fields are there in library metadata?
  * Can the calculators deal with orphan works?
  * Neighbouring rights or moral rights 'plugins'?
  * Transitional provisions?
  * Country specific quirks, e.g. Peter Pan provision in UK legislation
  * Lists of types of works?
  * Granularity: work, edition, ...

We also spoke about the future of work in this area -- in particular
about moving from case-by-case calculation of whether works are in the
public domain, to automated calculation using meta data about works.
It was agreed that we will discuss this more extensively at the
Communia meeting in Berlin in October. We ended the morning session
with discussion of Communia policy recommendations related to work in
this area.

After lunch we moved on to more extensive discussions about the final
report and the recommendations that WG6 will put forward. We agreed
upon two main recommendations (possibly one if they are combined). We
talked about the principles and recommendations in the Public Domain
Manifesto, and how these sat with the final Communia deliverables. We
discussed several new minor recommendations -- for example one on
continuing work on the public domain calculators, and piloting
automated calculation in a few EU member states. Finally we discussed
an appendix giving an overview of what the calculator are, what they
do, and why they are valuable.

### Action items

  * Christina: To write to list with a comprehensive list of all
questions involved in doing calculation, to be cross referenced with
available information sources (e.g. library data).
  * Lucie/Christina: To publish research/charts so far for others to
review (pending go ahead from Europeana)
  * Lucie/Christina: To write to the list about progress on first
question (related to the types of works).
  * Lucie/Paul/Severine/Jonathan: To write to J.C. about where Public
Domain Manifesto will sit with final Communia deliverables.
  * Jonathan: To give some examples of records about works, so we can
see what kind of information they typically include that could be
useful for public domain calculation.
  * Jonathan: To start conversation with bibliographic data folks
ahead of October meeting.
  * Jonathan: To put together first draft of text about the Public
Domain Calculators.
  * Jonathan: To find out more about how Communia outputs will be
presented in Brussels.
  * [DONE] Jonathan: To introduce IVIR folks to Tulane regarding
sharing work on calculators.
  * [DONE] Jonathan/Primavera: To start shared spreadsheet for contact
management
  * [DONE] Paul: to have first stab at main recommendation based on
our discussions.

-- 
Jonathan Gray

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

http://twitter.com/jwyg
http://identi.ca/jwyg