The first chapter by Giancarlo Frosio investigates the state of the digital public domain in Europe, and recommends policy strategies for enhancing a healthy public domain and making digital content in Europe more accessible and usable. The second chapter also contains academic articles building the legal framework of the public domain. With his Copyright 2.0 proposal, Marco Ricolfi makes concrete proposals for changes in copyright legislation to fit the digital environment in the context of the i2010 strategy. Lucie Guibault presents an evaluation of the Directive 2001/29/EC on the harmonization of certain aspects of copyright and related rights in the digital information society in the light of the recommendation on digitization and accessibility of material preserved by libraries, archives and museums. Giuseppe Mazziotti seeks to explore how the implementation of open access licences onto recordings and other forms of digital performance of creative works which have entered the public domain, complements the notion of digital commons.
The third section gathers developments and case studies. The first two papers of this section analyse the research commons in biological sciences. Enrico Bertacchini surveys the main economic issues concerning the emergence of contractually-constructed research commons, with a particular attention to the field of biological/genetic resources and biotechnologies. Tom Dedeurwaerdere, Per M. Stromberg and Unai Pascual study the social motivations and incentives in ex situ conservation of microbial genetic resources.
The three next chapters describe the founding principles of key institutions and projects engaged in promoting the digital public domain within research and society. Rufus Pollock and Jo Walsh present some of the concepts underlying the work led by the Open Knowledge Foundation, while Kaitlin Thaney introduces how Science Commons helps building the “Research Web”. Karen Van Godtsenhoven presents the European DRIVER project (Digital Repository Infrastructure Vision for European Research), a portal for open access scientific communication. The last two chapters present technical developments implementing the digital public domain. Hal Abelson, Ben Adida, Mike Linksvayer and Nathan Yergler developed Creative Commons Rights Expression Language (CC REL), the standard recommended by Creative Commons to the W3C for machine-readable expression of copyright licensing terms and related information. Roland Alton Scheidl, Joe Benso and Martin Springer describe good practices for online registration services of creative works.
