Last week I went to the first COMMUNIA workshop on Technology and the Public Domain in Turin.

COMMUNIA coordinator Juan Carlos De Martin and Rishab Ghosh of MERIT, University of Maastricht gave opening talks. I was on a panel with Kaitlin Thaney of Science Commons, Nathan Yergler of Creative Commons and Keith Jeffery of euroCRIS. My slides are available at:

• http://m.okfn.org/files/talks/communia_20080118/

Other talks directly related to open knowledge included:

• Xavier Serra (Music Technology Group, Pompeu Fabra University) – on automated metadata production for sound, and the freesound project (content is currently licensed under CC Sampling Plus, but there are plans to introduce other licensing options)
• Simone Brunozzi – on BeeSeek, a peer to peer open-source search engine
• Séverine Dusollier (FUNDP – Centre de recherche informatique et droit) – on setting up a positive legal definition and regime for the public domain

Seeing as though there look to be many areas of common interest between the OKF and the COMMUNIA network, I suggested in my talk and thoughout the day that:

• We should work together to create a set of ‘public domain calculators’ – or algorithms that can help to determine whether or not a given work is out of copyright in a given jurisdiction (such as we’ve been working on with Public Domain Works and the Open Library);
• We should work together to pool open metadata – whether this be bibliographic metadata, or metadata for databases or large collections of knowledge resources (such as are listed in CKAN).

This is a great opportunity to strengthen the community of individuals and organisations with an interest in open knowledge and the public domain across Europe. I look forward to seeing the launch of the Working Groups!

Related posts:

1. Public Domain Works + The Open Library As some of you will know, Public Domain Works, a joint initiative of the Open Knowledge Foundation, Free Culture UK and the Open Rights Group, had its alpha launch back in August. The Public Domain Works Database is an open...
2. The Value of the Public Domain Published As advertised in a previous post my paper entitled The Value of the Public Domain was published today by the IPPR as a part of a set commissioned for their project on IP and the Public Sphere. You can download...
3. Public Domain Works Database Project The Open Knowledge Foundation have been working on a Public Domain Works Database in association with with Free Culture UK (as part of FC-UK’s larger Public Domain Burn project). There is now a front-end site up (as of last weekend!)...