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The Faculty of Medicine of the University of Florence, has designed and implemented a multimedia digital library storing images, movies, audio files, power point presentations, and so on, all of them can be used freely according to the Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-ShareAlike license in all kind of e-learning activities, personal studies and every non commercial activity. Digital imaging is heavily employed in medicine for diagnostic or health purpose as well as for educational one. Furthermore the development of the multimedia in the educational is helped by the Information and Communications Technology (ICT), mostly the Internet. Images of anatomy, pathological or not, microscopic or macroscopic, as well as interactive simulation of clinical cases and movies of pathological conditions can be very helpful for students learning complex situations and concepts. This is the reason why it is important to ensure the availability of digital multimedia resources free from copyright bounds and freely available for the scientific community.

Questo/a opera è pubblicato sotto una Licenza Creative Commons.

The main goal of UPCommons is to organize and preserve the intellectual heritage of the Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya. UPCommons facilitates a unique access point to all different open access repositories (theses, e-prints, journals and conferences published/organized by UPC, course materials, academic works and videos). Till now, it is not mandatory for authors to archive their works. However, UPCommons is integrated with other UPC information systems or services (like the Virtual campus, the information system for the research output, academical managing tools, electronic ID systems, etc.). This fact makes UPC repositories very useful and is encouraging the university community (teachers, researchers, students) to archive their works. By now, there are about 9.800 documents in the repositories hosted in UPCommons. Besides, UPC Libraries provide two services which are giving support to the Institutional Repository: the Intellectual Property Service and the "Factories", where professors are helped to improve their course materials and to convert them into digital formats.

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Addressing a variety of issues (and variables) related to EU network and financial infrastructures, this presentation argues that their development is closely intertwined - and, more importantly, is a matter concerning public interest and government policies.

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Objective of this paper is to examine the reasons why a Commons Based Peer Production (CBPP) model may be applied in the case of developing regulatory instruments and the implications from the implementation of such a production mode. Starting point for the paper is the observation that CBPP constitutes a representation of an increasing number of institutions and organizational constellation of contemporary society ranging from Free Open Source Software to social networks software, open manufacturing or distributed political networks. The prevalence of CBPP is a direct result of contemporary socio-technical conditions and as this paper argues it also causes a paradigmatic shift in the way we built regulation. This study focuses on the regulation of IPRs as a primary example of the way in which CBPP appears as an alternative model for regulatory production. While the discourse in relation to the protection of the public domain has been primarily focused on the question of its regulatory content (i.e. achieving a more balanced rights allocation and dealing with the issue of mass scale infringement), this paper argues that it should also focus on the mode of producing the relevant regulatory instruments. The mis-match between the socio-economic realities of a digitally networked environment and regulatory content is the symptom of a deeper problem of regulatory alienation of the regulated subject from the content of the relevant regulatory instruments. The adoption of a CBPP model for regulatory production could solve problems of efficiency and effectiveness as well as of representation. The Creative Commons (CC) case is presented as a paradigmatic case of applying such a model for the production of licensing schemes and policies that could operate as an add-on to the existing Copyright system. While CC is a first effort toward the direction of CBPP regulatory production is far from being one. This paper examines the degree to which CC conforms to the CBPP model, the reasons why is should move more actively toward such direction and the ways in which this could be done. This research concludes by highlighting the importance such paradigmatic shift could have for the area of IPR regulation and the potentials from adopting such a regulatory strategy.

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Governments and their administrative agencies continuously create, collect, manage, and store vast quantities of digital data and information and increasingly disseminate much of it online. The data and information that are produced by the public sector bodies include, for example, geographic and meteorological data, company registers, financial reports, public health information, social and economic statistics, legislation and judicial proceedings, and many other kinds of information, collectively referred to as public sector information (PSI).

Rapidly advancing information and communication technologies (ICT) have begun to fundamentally transform all information industries, including in the public sector, over the past two decades. These technologies have improved the information management potential within the public sector and made the dissemination of information cheaper and easier. By leveraging the opportunities of ICTs, PSI has thus increasingly been used beyond its initial purposes. Economic and social value is derived from PSI directly as an exploitable public good for products and services, and indirectly as a basis for improving efficiencies in decision making.

In many countries, especially within the OECD, PSI is used broadly by other public-sector organizations, by private-sector companies in general (as information users), by information industry firms in particular (as re-users through their value-added information products and services), by research communities, and by individual users in society (e.g., for health and educational purposes). In many cases, the information is used beyond national borders as a global public good.

At the same time, governments have been developing or revising their policies concerning access to and use of PSI through legislative and regulatory (administrative) mechanisms. Some of these policies extend across the entire government, while others are specific to certain types of information or specific agencies within the government. Within the OECD countries, and indeed throughout the world, there are different approaches and levels of access to and use of PSI. Access and use policies vary from fully open to restricted, freely available or with various access fee charges, and ranging from unrestricted use to a broad range of use restrictions. Moreover, the access and use policies and conditions vary not only across national governments, but also in many cases within each country at the state and local levels. Also, some governments have initiatives for promoting the use of the Internet for disseminating their information products to the public.

In general, there is a growing recognition by both the public and private sectors of the importance of digital networks to the economy and society, and the key role that PSI and government policies governing such information play. Despite this recognition, there is surprisingly a poor understanding of how PSI is actually used, especially by individual users, its economic and social value and impact, and of the effects of different access and use policies on this value and impact. There is a concomitant lack of comprehensive or detailed empirical data about the users and effects of PSI disseminated on the Internet, and of the different policy approaches to the dissemination of PSI.

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Creative Commons (CC) licenses have been created in the context of United States copyright law. Their porting in continental Europe jurisdictions revealed differences between the two legal systems and cultures, such as the role of collecting societies, the status of certain performances and displays in public places, database rights, liability and warranties.
CC licenses can also be interpreted as the expression of the personality of the author. Attribution is generalized. The Non Derivative Works option, the reputation and the non-endorsement clauses corresponds to the moral right of integrity. Contributing to the commons or reserving commercial rights express the right of destination.
Beyond differences between Common law copyright and Roman-German contract law and droit d’auteur, CC licenses can finally be interpreted as an example of global law reflecting the nature of intellectual or personal rights at the digital age, a cultural norm evolving with communities practices.

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I.
Digitalizing literary and musical works do not raise specific issues concerning copyrights. Digitalizing such works and making them available on the internet require rights of reproduction or rights to make available to the public.
Due to the harmonisation of copyright law in the EU by the Information Society Directive there are scarcely any differences between member states as far as the protection of digitalized works as such is concerned.
However, the situation differs quite a lot with regard to limitations or mandatory licences of digitalized works. As the InfoSoc-Directive only provides for a certain set of limitations which, however, is not mandatory rather than optional for member states, the situation in Europe resembles a rag rug. Limitations in one member state are not necessarily matched by limitations in other member states.
Moreover, member states do not treat unanimously ephemere and/or temporarily copies; some jurisdictions still regard even access providing as requiring copies and hence copyright licences.
Finally, liability issues are more and more at the centre of debates as providers are compelled to undertake filtering and controlling activities despite the prohibition of active monitoring obligations by the E-Commerce-Directive. “Voluntary” agreement such as the Olivennes-Report in France are significant for the ongoing discussion.
The reinforcement of liability and enforcement of copyright infringements, however, may also endanger activities for sharing content and enabling free access to content. As portals, libraries etc. could face liability claims in case of sharing protected content the management of copyrights of the content shared and hosted becomes crucial.
File-Sharing as one of the most popular methods to share copyrighted content is mostly qualified as a copyright infringement, be it the upload or the download because the privilege of private use (fair use) is trespassed.
II. Open Access and the InfoSoc-Directive
From a perspective of sharing and freely accessing content European law does not offer many chances for member states to limit copyrights for public purposes. Art. 6 para 4 subpara 4 of the InfoSoc-Directive blocks most of attempts to enable free access online to copyrighted content. Moreover, Art. 5 para 2, 3 of the InfoSoc-Directive provides only for a limited scope of mandatory limitations on copyright.
However, the exact scope of the InfoSoc-Directive still is opaque as compulsory licences are obviously not covered by the Directive. Such models of using compulsory licences have been discussed in Germany recently. Nevertheless, international conventions like the Berne Convention restrict largely the use of such licences.
On the other side, European law does not hinder contractual approaches to enable sharing of content and free access to works, such as open source, open access, or creative commons licenses.
III. Retrodigitalisation (“orphan works”)
One crucial issue for sharing content and enabling free access to content concerns the retrodigitalisation of already published works:
In theory, authors of published works might be asked to license their works for electronic use to libraries or other repositories. However, most of the authors are hard to reach as their addresses or even more their heirs are unknown. The InfoSoc-Directive does not deal directly with this issue as no specific limitations are offered to open archives to the public use (or even more for electronic use). However, the limited range of allowed limitations hamper the introduction of specific “orphan works” limitations in member states in order to retrodigitalize those works and open archives for public use.
Hence, according to the current legal situation only contractual solutions or fictions of license transferences are possible:
Germany opted for a fiction that provides that all unknown publishing rights are transferred within a year to the publisher if the author does not object to it. However, there is neither any obligation for the publisher to (retro-) digitalize the work nor to make it accessible to the public. Moreover, there are serious doubts if such a fiction passes the 3-step-test as the author will loose all rights to the publisher (however, combined with a compensation for the author).
Other member states make use of a collective licensing model such as the Scandinavian states. However, collective licenses can not differ between such works whose author can be found and asked to transfer the rights and real orphan works where no author could be found. Thus, it is arguable whether such solutions are legitimate from the perspective of the constitutional protection of authors (property rights).

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The natural destiny of a work is the public. Works embody a discourse to be transmitted to the public. But there are some situations where copyrighted works are obliged to remain in silence. So when it is impossible to identify the rightholder or, if identifiable, it is impossible to locate her. Without the possibility of getting her permission, the so-called orphan works can be neither reproduced nor communicated to the public. Therefore their role in the public sphere is severely mutilated. But this is not the sole situation in which Copyright Law forces the works to be in captivity. Such a silence comes out again in relation to out of print works, to those works that are out of the market. These creations, sterile from a commercial point of view, become also sterile from the cultural one. Captivity appears over again in the case of other abandoning situations, for example when rightholders do not reply to the request of potential users. The more paradigmatic (and problematic) situation is that related to unpublished items, works that, in most cases, have not even been intended to be a work and then to contribute to the public sphere.
Digital libraries have a key role in preserving the voice of copyrighted works. In the cases mentioned above, the copyrights (and sometimes not only the copyrights) impose a mandatory silence justified on the exclusive rights, on the autonomy of will. It cuts short preservation and access to DL projects and increases the risk of a black cultural hole. But the fact is that we do not know about the will of the author, nor her heirs or other rightholders. Then, is this mandatory silence in coherence with the social function of our legal systems? Silent works do not provide any benefit to the author, neither to the society. How should react the legislator as far as this empty space, neither private nor public, is concerned? Some countries are already discussing partial solutions to face this problem. Are they enough? To take profit of the possibilities that technology gives us to liberate these works, to put their muzzles off, to incorporate them in the public sphere may require, once more, a reflection exercise about the fundaments of the copyright systems and about the best shape of our Copyright Law. It goes without saying that Digital Libraries may help in this liberation process, to what extent will depend not only on the will of the authors but on the will of our international and national policy makers.
This paper intends to be a first attempt of a copyright silence roadmap and to briefly describe the different measures that have been proposed to tackle this problem and, as far as possible, to restore the voice of silent works.

This title is of course inspired by Griliches’ seminal 1979 article on assessing the returns to R&D . But I make no claim that the discussion here will inspire as much subsequent research or be as influential as that article. The case is also somewhat different, with social returns or benefits being somewhat more to the forefront than in the Griliches article. But some similarities to the problem of measuring returns to R&D will no doubt become evident.
1. Define what we mean by creative and scientific commons. Give examples. Should we restrict the discussion to databases to keep things simpler? Or to scientific commons more generally? One way to view these activities is as IP “pools,” that are constructed using some kind of contracting, analogously to patent pools used for standard-setting or cross-licensing.
2. What are the alternative mechanisms for data provision and diffusion? Often there is transitory high economic value alongside permanent archival value as data accumulates. Documentation and archiving is costly – in situations where searchable archives have been created, particularly in chemistry and biomedical research areas, they are often protected and priced far above marginal costs of data search and extraction. Give examples.
What’s the goal? For society, diffusion of knowledge and increases in future researcher productivity. For individual producers, reputation, contribution to the public good, etc. Heterogeneous behaviour is very important here – some researchers are very public good conscious and others not at all. Therefore free-riding is bound to happen, the question is whether it is important enough to harm the enterprise, and which enforcement mechanisms work best .
What’s the output? For example, it is possible to measure citations to various databases organized in different ways. This might prove useful if other factors (related to type of data) could be controlled for. David reports that such mechanisms are being created by Science Commons as part of its MTA mechanism, allowing labs to track the use of materials through citations to the papers and patents that the users file and that similar mechanisms are being developed for the SC Neurocommons project.
What’s the cost? Who bears it? What types of licenses are chosen by different types of authors? The role of social norms. Inputs are essentially a byproduct of other activities (joint production) which complicates things. Thinking about databases, there is clearly a separate cost to releasing them to the public, related to support and maintainance (even if provided on an “as is” basis, professional reputation concerns will induce some response to queries and errors).
The goal of the paper is to make a start on answering some of these questions and to point the way to future research that might help to quantify the performance of various types of scientific commons.

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The Austrian Competence Network for Media Design, a research consortium of Austrian higher education institutions and SMEs in the socalled creative industries, had launched a service for registering creative works at the WizardsofOS conference in Berlin in September 2006. After nearly two years of operation, we would like to draw a summary of experiences and challenges. Furthermore, we will have a look at related services and Creative Commons' strategy on this issue.
The creator who registers with Registered Commons benefits from two important advantages. A certificate issued allows the creator to provide evidence for her intellectual ownership of a work. Secondly, and almost as important for evidence of authorship as a certificate, Registered Commons digitally records the exact time of a registration with a timestamp, obtained from a trusted third party. Typical users are musicians or photographers, who are keen to post individual works on the internet, but who wish to retain control over them, or bloggers and even agencies who prior to giving client presentations, wish to protect their work from plagiarism using the timestamp.
Companies who are interested in the commercial distribution and other uses of the material require legal security for their business, notably in the form of reliable information. Precisely this is missing from many websites that offer material under alternative licences, the public domain as well as for orphan works.
In this paper we present good practices for online registration services at the first COMMUNIA conference on the Public Domain in the Digital Age (COMMUNIA 2008). Furthermore, we will be going to ask the following questions: Is reliable and simple registration of works the right way to improve confidentiality and trust? How could Rights Collecting Societies benefit from such registries? What kind of governance is required, to run such registries? And do they conflict with public patent laws or authorities? We will conclude with a proposal for either adapting the DMP authority scheme or establishing registration peering and using existing namespaces. The authors are affiliated with Registered Commons, a service initiative launched in 2006.

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