If you ever feel demoralised about the public domain not being safeguarded enough, or laws being insufficient, I recommend that you join Public Domain Day. It’s a one day event that almost feels like a therapy session with enthusiastic people, amazing ideas, and projects that make you hopeful. I personally went back home with my ‘open advocate’ resilience re-loaded.
Throughout the event, a few people shared memories of Public Domain Day celebrations from 10 years ago. They were happy to see that more and more people join year after year, with more and more organisations contributing to its organisation (this year COMMUNIA, Meemoo, Wikimedia Europe, Wikimedia Belgium, the Europeana Initiative, Creative Commons, CREATE, Internet Archive Europe, the Royal Library of Belgium and Open Nederland). Thanks are due in particular to three people who have spent countless hours on making the event possible: Camille Françoise, Bart Magnus (Meemoo), and Sebastiaan ter Burg (Europeana Foundation).
If you did not join this year, I invite you to watch the recordings online. Below is a breakdown of how the day went, so that you can go straight to the topics that you are most interested in.
Keynote: what is the public domain?
Would you say that openly licensed content is in the public domain? What about ideas? Can we understand the concept of the public domain in such a broad way, preceding copyright protection and going beyond it? Or should it be understood as the ‘negative space’ left by copyright resulting from the lack of originality, and the expiration of protection?
This fundamental question was asked last year at Public Domain Day 2025, and Bartolomeo Meletti (Create, University of Glasgow) took on the challenge. He read years of academic literature on the topic to be able to answer it by January 2026. You can hear it in his keynote presentation, or fast forward to minute 25 for the main conclusions.
Policy updates
Following the keynote, a couple of short talks gave a good overview of the current policy landscape and how it impacts the public domain.
Has your organisation signed the Creative Commons Open Heritage Statement? If not, Brigitte Vézina tells you why you should. By doing so, you will contribute to UNESCO one day adopting a declaration defending open culture, an objective pursued by Creative Commons under the TAROCH initiative.
In the talk that followed, I was lucky to convey a message on behalf of the Europeana Copyright Community Steering Group: that the 2019 Copyright Directive is under review, and that we need to make sure there is evidence about how some of the provisions are not working well. I spoke about the improvements that we would like to see introduced to the public domain provision, Article 14, in particular in terms of scope and relationship with other laws.
Are you familiar with the the Internet Archive Europe? Listen to Beatrice Murch talk about the many activities and projects they have lined up. They are looking to collaborate, so reach out!
If you are a diligent reader of Communia’s newsletter, like many of us are, you might have seen something about an Omnibus in your inbox. Why are they talking about transportation methods, you might wonder? Leander clarifies it in his talk. An Omnibus happens to (also) be a legislative instrument used in EU law making to bring together various acts into one, for simplicity. The last one touches upon privacy and open data, among other things, and comes with a couple of surprises…
Paul Keller (Open Future) talked about Commons DB, an EU-funded project that has been up and running for one year and in which Europeana Foundation is a partner. Commons DB is a registry for openly licensed and public domain materials that relies on ISCC codes. It is one of these initiatives that gives you the feeling that we are moving forwards, and makes you dream about all of the problems that this technology could solve. Check out the demo of Commons DB that Paul did at the event, which was followed by an afternoon workshop (not recorded). The project is on the lookout for new providers, so reach out!
Research and evidence
We were honoured to have the participation of prominent scholars who shared relevant research results that have an impact on the public domain.
Séverine Dusollier (Sciences Po Paris) spoke about something that many of us probably think but are unable to convey with so much evidence: that different durations of copyright make the public domain ridiculously complex in the online world and lead to absurd situations. I encourage you to listen to her presentation.
Aline Iramina (CREATe, University of Glasgow) shared the results of exciting research she has done for Creative Commons. When considering adopting openly licensing models, being able to track downstream use is of particular relevance for cultural heritage organisations.
Kristofer Erickson (CREATe, University of Glasgow) shared with us what in my opinion should become the tagline for future Public Domain Day celebrations: ‘the public domain is about people, taking risks, innovating and creating value’. He unfolded each part of the sentence with evidence he has collected over the years.
Finally, in his talk Martin Kretschmer (CREATe, University of Glasgow) unveiled an elephant in the room: in deals with AI companies, public domain content is being licensed and paid for. The barriers to public domain materials keep evolving.
Those of us onsite participated in a really interesting Q&A that focused particularly on the territoriality questions underpinning the public domain.
Putting the public domain into practice
The programme followed with a number of afternoon workshops and presentations (some of which were not recorded) that showcased practical initiatives around the public domain.
Check out, for example, how crowdsourced efforts can help advance the public domain:
In making available fashion design patterns in this talk by Dieter Suls and Stijn Van den Bulck
And in identifying death dates, so that public domain calculations can be made, in this talk by Annabelle Shaw and Louise McAward-White (British Film Institute)
You can also hear about some practical ways in which public domain materials have been used creatively, through:
Remixing heritage to imagine future sea-level rise scenario (In the context of a Cultural Game Jam by Carlo Gaetano (University of Amsterdam) & Wyzte Koppelman (Netherlands Institute for Sound & Vision)
Happy accidents with public domain videos by Björn Wijers
or Tapestries, a mechanism for exposing the rich store of digital objects stored at WikiMedia Commons, the Internet Archive and Europeana by Bob Stein.
Finally, Maarten Zeinstra (Open Nederland, IP Squared) gave us a lesson of modesty in his talk about Wiki loves public domain. This initiative seeks to safeguard public domain materials by for example adding biographies of creators whose works entered the public domain on Wikipedia, public domain material in Wikicommons, or certain entries through Wikidata. In his view, the project should lead to a higher number of contributions. Let’s make sure that he can share even better results next year.
Get involved and find out more
If you would like to be the first to hear news about the public domain and related developments in Europe, we also invite you to join the Europeana Network Association Copyright Community and continue the conversations! We are slowly starting to prepare for Public Domain 2027, so stay tuned for more information through our usual channels.