The economic and social impact of the public domain

The project entitled Economic and Social Impact of the Public Domain in the Information Society commenced work on 1st January 2008 and is due to provide its final report to the European Commission by the end of April 2009. At this time, June 2008, the principle area of work for the project team is the gathering of data to enable the analysis to be undertaken to estimate the number, value and use of public domain works. We expect this data gathering process to continue through until September. Analysis is expected to commence in July and will very much be an iterative process with on-going data gathering activities.
In addition, the project team has been working on a stream of activity which will seek to assess the capacity of European cultural institutions to implement the principles for re-use as established in the Public Sector Information Directive. This is expected to be completed by the beginning of August. Finally, early stage data gathering has commenced on the stream of work which will focus on the identification and analysis of the currently available mechanisms for voluntary sharing of content.
The focus of the first few months of the project has been the development of methodologies and scoping of the requirements for data gathering. Given that there are no results to discuss, this paper focuses on the methodologies the project team will be taking with the various streams of work.