[pd-discuss] Privatization of the public domain by the BnF

Wed Jan 16 20:07:43 UTC 2013

The French Ministry of Culture announced yesterday the signing of two
agreements between the Bibliothèque nationale de France (BnF) and private
firms for the scanning of documents belonging  (either partially or as a
whole) to the public domain, including old books and over 200,000 sound
recordings.

These partnerships include a 10-year exclusive agreement allowing for these
private firms to commercialize the digitized documents into their database
- before they will be made available online on the digital library of the
BnF (Gallica).

These agreement are a form of commodification of the public domain, which
has been explicitly condemned by the Public Domain
Manifesto<http://www.publicdomainmanifesto.org/>of the COMMUNIA
European network <http://communia-project.eu> (now Communia
association<http://communia-association.org>
):

Recommendation 4.    Any false or misleading attempt to misappropriate
Public Domain material must be legally punished. In order to preserve the
integrity of the Public Domain and protect users of Public Domain material
from inaccurate and deceitful representations, any false or misleading
attempts to claim exclusivity over Public Domain material must be declared
unlawful.

Recommendation 5.    No other intellectual property right must be used to
reconstitute exclusivity over Public Domain material. The Public Domain is
integral to the internal balance of the copyright system. This internal
balance must not be manipulated by attempts to reconstitute or obtain
exclusive control via regulations that are external to copyright.

In France, several organizations including la Quadradure du Net, Creative
Commons France, Wikimedia France, OKFN France are drafting a document to
protest against this. Anyone willing to join this effort is welcome.
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