Public Domain Manifesto

I'd like to alert THEN/HiER members to an important international initiative underway to protect access to information in the public domain and to push back against increasingly restrictive copyright laws. COMMUNIA, the European Thematic Network on the Digital Public Domain, recently produced The Public Domain Manifesto. The Manifesto asserts the importance of the public domain for cultural production and community knowledge, and includes several recommendations and reforms to protect and enhance the public domain.
 
COMMUNIA defines the public domain as "the wealth of information that is free from the barriers to access or reuse usually associated with copyright protection, either because it is free from any copyright protection or because the right holders have decided to remove these barriers. It is the raw material from which new knowledge is derived and new cultural works are created."
 
For researchers and practitioners who routinely use images and other material from the internet and other sources in their daily work, trends toward proprietary control of such information infringe upon their ability to create knowledge.
 
Show your support for this initiative by signing the manifesto and finding out more about constraints upon the public domain. For more detail on the subject and its relevance to historians and history educators, see Canadian historian Sean Kheraj's comment on this topic on his Canadian History & Environment blog, or join the ongoing discussion of the issue on Facebook.