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4 knowledge. Finally, general guidelines for a politics of the public domain will be drafted together with the sketching of a positive view of Europe with a stronger public domain. Each of the subjects discussed in this chapter are further developed and detailed in Annex II of the Communia Final Report.

1. What is the public domain?

Defining the boundaries and inner meaning of the public domain is conducive to the aim of strengthening its protection and its promotion. There are many public domains that change in shape according to the hopes and the agenda they embody. The diversity of the Communia network has provided an opportunity to internalise this protean nature of the public domain. The outcome has been a comprehensive vision that projects the understanding of the European public domain in a global international dimension. This vision conveys the perception that the public domain is never a definition but instead a statement of purpose, and a project of enhanced democracy, globalised shared culture and reciprocal understanding. Communia has attempted to propel a process of definitional re-construction of the public domain in positive and affirmative terms. It envisions the public domain as having a very substantial element of attraction to aggregate social forces devoted to promoting public access to culture and knowledge. The traditional definition regarded the public domain as a “wasteland of undeserving detritus” and did not “worry about ‘threats’ to this domain any more than [it] would worry about scavengers who go to garbage dumps to look for abandoned property”. This definitional approach has been discarded in the last thirty years. In 1981, David Lange published his seminal work, Recognizing the Public Domain, and departed from the traditional line of investigation. Lange suggested that “recognition of new intellectual property interests should be offset today by equally deliberate recognition of individual rights in the public domain”. In January 2008, Séverine Dusollier reinstated that idea at the first Communia Workshop by speaking of a “positively defined public domain”:

"In legal regimes of intellectual property, the public domain is generally defined in a negative manner, as the resources in which no IP right is vested. This no-rights perspective entails that the actual regime of the public"