[pd-discuss] Report of the PD Day in Torino (22 Jan 2011)

[J.C. DE MARTIN]

      COMMUNIA Project


      22 January 2011


  Report on Public Domain Day 2011

    For the first time in Italy the Public Domain Day was celebrated
    with a public meeting. The meeting was made possible by the joint
    efforts of *Juan Carlos De Martin* co-founder of the Center for
    Internet & Society NEXA <http://nexa.polito.it/>at the Politecnico
    di Torino, *Peiretti Federico*, head of the PolyMath
    <http://areeweb.polito.it/didattica/polymath/>Project of Istituto
    Superiore Mario Boella and *Angelo Raffaele Meo*, former president
    of Accademia delle Scienze di Torino
    <http://www.accademiadellescienze.it/>from 2006 to 2009, with the
    support of the Politecnico di Torino and within the context of
    COMMUNIA <http://www.communia-project.eu/>, the European Thematic
    Network on the Digital Public Domain. In the charming "Salone
    d'Onore" of the Valentino Castle in Turin, De Martin, bringing the
    greetings of the Rector of the Politecnico, said that copyright
    represented only a temporary condition of the intellectual work,
    while the Public Domain was its "natural state".

    For the occasion, the actor *Gianni Bissaca* read some passages of
    works of Vito Volterra (who died in 1940), mathematician who
    contributed to the birth of the modern version of Politecnico di
    Torino in 1906 and Francis Scott Fitzgerald, American writer and
    author of the novel "The Great Gatsby", who also passed away in
    1940. *Franco Pastrone*, professor of Mathematical Physics at the
    University of Turin, narrated the extraordinary events that marked
    the life of Volterra, who, besides the outstanding scientific
    contributions, which included the founding of the National Research
    Council of Italy (CNR), was one of twelve (out of 1,200) Italian
    university professors that refuse to swear the oath of loyalty to
    fascism in 1931, thereby, losing his tenure, a condition further
    exacerbated, since Volterra was Jewish, after the shameful approval
    of the Racial Laws in 1938.

    With regards to works of fiction, *Ernesto Ferrero*, director of the
    Torino International Book Fair, after an interesting overview of
    copyright history in Italy since before the Unification of the
    country in 1861, pointed out that writing, thanks to the digital
    revolution, becomes more easily a collective work within a context
    in which we need to find a balance between the expansion of Public
    Domain, and the remuneration of the individual. However, Ferrero
    said, seventy years after the death of the author that characterize
    the current copyright conditions are an excessive term of protection
    which constitute an obstacle to the spread of culture.

    This view was also shared by *Pietro Rossi*, the current president
    of the Academy of Sciences, which highlighted the great effort for
    scanning documents and publications belonging to the library of the
    Academy, so that they could be available to the general public.
    *Maurizio Ferraris*, professor at the University of Turin, has
    focused on a philosophical point of view of the concept of Public
    Domain. It makes a vital contribution to the condition of "ideal
    objectivity" in which writing takes place and becomes a basic
    requirement in a situation in which we witness the proliferation of
    new forms of "documentality" (the key concept of prof. Ferraris's
    recent research).

    During the morning was also presented the digital version of a book
    entitled "*Storia del Politecnico di Torino*", written by Giuseppe
    Maria Pugno in 1959. Since the book is as useful as rare, it was
    digitized and distributed online under a Creative Commons license
    for the occasion of the Public Domain Day. The book is currently
    available on the portal that collects the digitized works of the
    Library System of Politecnico di Torino.
    (http://digit.biblio.polito.it/ <http://digit.biblio.polito.it/>).
    The history covers the years from 1861 to the outbreak of World War II.



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