audiovisual works allow these categories of right-holders to produce and release their creations in a way that is much cheaper than it has been at any other time.[1] Due to the cheap character of digital production and communication techniques, today’s holders of copyright-related rights, when releasing their creative works to the public in digital settings, do not seek necessarily to recover the reduced costs of performance, recording and dissemination. These categories of right-holders might increasingly consider a higher exposure on the Internet as more beneficial to their subsequent business opportunities than an immediate monetization of all exclusive rights created automatically by copyright law on their digital items. New open access licensing practices, which have developed considerably in the last years due to the spread of such legal standards as Creative Commons, have mostly attracted emerging performers, virtual recording labels and web-casters. In the case of works where no actual author right exists, these licences have the potential to increase significantly the stock of public domain works (for instance, most of the classical music repertoire) which are performed, recorded and embodied into digital items and made available to the public for free. In this situation, the contractual technique of open access management, while seeking to remove most legal restrictions created by copyright-related rights to the free use and dissemination of digital performances of public domain works, may have a crucial role for the building of digital commons. To enable this function and to achieve the policy objective of the highest dissemination of unprotected works, open access licences such as Creative Commons shall be deemed to be applicable to the management of neighbouring rights in the same way as they apply to the management of copyright.
- 2. How open access licences complement the notion of digital commons: Creative Commons
At least in civil law (droit d’auteur) systems, newly created works are granted copyright protection by default and enter the public domain only after expiration of the protection term of 70 years post mortem autoris. Unlike US law, droit d’auteur systems which conceive authors’ rights as non-waivable
personality rights do not seem to endorse and confer contractual validity upon
- ↑ Giuseppe Mazziotti, EU Digital Copyright Law and the End-user (Berlin: Springer, 2008), pp. 3–4.
