[pd-discuss] [OpenGLAM] All public domain material liberated by 2020?

[Lotte Belice]

...in the spirit of 'It is better to fail aiming high than to succeed aiming low.' [1] 

Dear all,

Thanks for sharing these insights. I attended the Europeana: Facilitate brainstorm workshop yesterday, as part of the team that discussed a scenario for the goal "All PD content is available for everyone for reuse in 2020". 

Although very important  and indeed no mean feat on its own, I do agree that to fully focus on PD content would very much weaken two other crucial topics that need to be considered, namely:

a) Push GLAMs towards an 'open unless' policy. I work at the Netherlands Institute for Sound and Vision, and we have (similar to other AV archives) virtually no PD material. However, we do own the rights to a small but still significant part of our collection, which we've partly opened up under CC BY-SA: newsreels (www.openimages.eu), field recordings (www.geluidvannederland.nl), and still pictures (www.beeldengeluidwiki.nl). We've studied the impact and added value extensively [2]. We still could do more though, there's much more content we could release under open licenses. Inspiring cases from front-runners (including Europeana) and a strong push to do so from national an EU policy will help memory organisations to provide access to collections to which they own the rights. 

b) Keep the lobby strong forfree educational / non-commercial use for in-copyright content. Neelie Kroes has eloquently voiced the need for this strong lobby as a response to the Licenses For Europe initiative. She says: "Time for copyright to be an enabler, not an obstacle." This is much broader than just the push for PD content. We need true copyright reform!

Needless to say, I applaud action for the PD content access in 2020 goal by Europeana. For this, we need - among many other things - widespread adoption of the Public Domain Charter [3] starting with front-runners and, as far as I'm concerned, a 'PD content must be marked as PD' approach similar to when Europeana pushed CC0 for metadata through the revised Data Exchange Agreeement [4]. We also need to know how much digital PD material in GLAMs collections is not yet available online under the right conditions, how much PD material is still in analogue form, the costs for digitising this analogue material, and for bringing all of it online. We need to collectively refuse digitisation projects that have contracts which result in new copyright layers (already one of the baselines of the PD Chapter of course). 

Yes, reaching the points above will challening. But we really must aim high in order to really make a long-lasting impact.


Best,
Lotte


[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bill_Nicholson_%28footballer%29
[2] http://mw2013.museumsandtheweb.com/paper/open-culture-data-opening-glam-data-bottom-up/
[3] http://pro.europeana.eu/c/document_library/get_file?uuid=d542819d-d169-4240-9247-f96749113eaa&groupId=10602
[4] http://creativecommons.org/weblog/entry/29133


On Friday, November 22, 2013 1:18 PM, Paul Keller <pk at kl.nl> wrote:
 
On 21 Nov 2013, at 20:07, Jonathan Gray <jonathan.gray at okfn.org> wrote:

> I think it would be a tremendous thing if Europeana were to pursue this goal more aggressively (e.g. by proactively encouraging institutions to open up their digital holdings as per the Public Domain Charter, not just their metadata), and to take seriously and foreground the idea that this should happen for all digital copies of public domain works - or even just in Europe - throughout their activities. All digital copies of public domain works open with no restrictions by 2020 is no mean feat.

well to some degree this is something that Europeana is already doing on a day to day basis. We are constantly engaging with data providers to make sure that PD material is made available without restrictions. That is something that we are pursuing fairly aggressively (just ask some of the data providers). It may not be as visible as the switch of the metadata to CC0, because there is no big bang moment here) but we are putting quite a lot of work into this.

I think the main diver of substantially increasing the amount of material will need to come from outside of europeana. If we really want to have all of europe’s PD works available without restriction then we need a substantial investment in new digitisation projects and funding for these must be made conditional on unrestricted public availability of the results. /Paul 


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