From the Communia-Association’s blog:

More information about the book can be found on the Communia Association’s website.

On Monday, June 18, MEP Amelia Andersdotter, along with her colleague MEP Ioannis Tsoukalas, is inviting you to attend the launch of the book ”The Digital Public Domain: Foundations for an Open Culture”, edited by Melanie Dulong de Rosnay and Juan Carlos De Martin as an output of the Communia Thematic Network.

The book is under a CC Attribution license and the PDF can be downloaded here.

”The Digital Public Domain: Foundations for an Open Culture”
18 June 2012
18:30 – 20:00
European Parliament, Brussels, ASP Main Hall
(Ground Floor, in front of the Newspapers Quiosque)

18:30 Welcome: MEP Amelia Andersdotter
18:35 Introduction: MEP Prof. Ioannis Tsoukalas
18:45 The Digital Public Domain – presentation by editors: Melanie Dulong & Juan Carlos De Martin
19:00 Q&A and Discussion / Cocktails
19:45 Closing remarks: MEP Amelia Andersdotter

If would like to attend the event and require access to the Parliament, please register with amelia.andersdotter-office@europarl.europa.eu before June 14, indicating your full name, date of birth and ID number.

Link to the invitation on Amelia Andersdotter’s blog.

A video interview of Anne-Catherine Lorrain, Juan Carlos De Martin and Melanie Dulong de Rosnay during the book launch event is available on YouTube. Thanks to Amelia Andersdotter’s team members Julia Reda, Edvinas Pauza and Tess Lindholm.

Elinor Ostrom, economics nobel prize in 2009 and inspiration for thinking about knowledge as a Commons, died june 12th. http://elinorostrom.indiana.edu/

Three book references:

Elinor Ostrom
Governing the Commons: The Evolution of Institutions for Collective Action
Link to book on amazon.de

Charlotte Hess, Elinor Ostrom (Ed.)
Understanding Knowledge as a Commons: From Theory to Practice
http://mitpress.mit.edu/catalog/item/default.asp?ttype=2&tid=11012

Silke Helfrich, Heinrich-Böll-Stiftung (Hg.)
Commons - Für eine neue Politik jenseits von Markt und Staat
http://www.transcript-verlag.de/ts2036/ts2036.php

OutOfCopyright.eu makes Public Domain Calculators available for the entire European Union

Works that have fallen into the public domain after their term of copyright protection has elapsed can be freely used by everybody. In theory that means that these works can be reused by anyone for any purpose which includes commercial exploitation. In theory the public domain status increases access to our shared knowledge and culture and encourages economic activities that do not take place as long as works are protected by copyright. In turn the commercial exploitation of public domain works (for example out of copyright books) has the tendency to increase their accessibility.

Users can use the calculators (and the underlying research published at outofcopyright.eu) to determine the copyright status of works in all these countries. This is the first time that this question has been structurally researched across all European jurisdictions.In practice however determining if a work has passed into the public domain can prove very difficult. This is especially true when attempting to determine the public domain status of content in multiple jurisdictions. As part of thelegal workpackage of the  EuropeanaConnect project, led by the national library of Luxembourg, Knowledgeland and the Institute for information Law at the University of Amsterdam have developed public domain calculators to answer the question whether a certain work or other subject matter vested with copyright or neighbouring rights (related rights) has fallen into the public domain. These public domain Calculators have been developed for 30 countries (the European Union plus Switzerland, Iceland & Norway) and are available at www.outofcopyright.eu

The results of this research of national copyright laws shows a complex semi-harmonized field of legislation across Europe that makes it unnecessarily difficult to unlock the cultural, social and economic potential of works in the public domain. Identification of works as being in the public domain needs be made easier and less resource consuming by simplifying and harmonizing rules of copyright duration and territoriality.

Outofcopyright continues to adjust and refine its calculators. It is also researching how to make calculation possible using large datasets like bibliographica, DBPedia and the Europeana datasets on cultural objects in Europe. 
We encourage everyone interested in the public domain to try the calculators, comment on them and re-use the published research. All research and other material on Outofcopyright is available under the terms of a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike license and the software powering the calculators can be reused under the terms of the EUPL license

 Lovely little film explaining Public Domain Calculators:

Public Domain Calculators from Open Knowledge Foundation on Vimeo.

More: http://blog.okfn.org/2010/10/12/new-microshort-film-on-the-public-domain-calculators/

Jonathon writes:

We recently attended a workshop in Luxembourg as part of Communia, the EU policy network on the digital public domain. There was a focus on bringing together themes from previous events to make a series of policy recommendations to the European Commission (watch this space!).

Below are a few notes highlighting some of the talks and discussions that we thought might be of particular interest to readers here:

Read on:
http://blog.okfn.org/2010/02/03/7th-communia-workshop-luxembourg/

Extensive report (in french)
http://www.europaforum.public.lu/fr/actualites/2010/02/communia/index.html