Page:The digital public domain.pdf/43

16 is the case for open alternatives to Facebook like the Diaspora project. Faced with Facebook’s centralised nature and desire to control online identities by trampling on privacy norms, the online community has been responding with the emergence of projects and experiments to redress the deficiencies of the Facebook model. The specificity of the Diaspora project resides also in crowd-sourced funding that was largely raised out of the dissatisfaction for the centralised social networking models.

The Musopen project provides an additional example of the potential of public domain works when exploited within an open and peer-based project. Musopen is a charity that aims to produce and distribute recordings and sheet music of public domain music. The project allows users to suggest pieces that they would like to have recorded and to pledge funds to pay for the recording. Recently, the project crowd-funded US$70,000 through a KickStarter campaign.

The interactive nature of the Web 2.0 has propelled user-generated creativity and defined a peculiar form of digital culture that has been termed as “free culture”. “Remix” and “mash up” are now keywords of the cultural process taking place in the digital environment. Remix culture has emphasised the potential for reuse of public domain material. Open networks, user-generated creativity, and remix culture have made the public domain highly generative. The public domain, once regarded as a “virtual wasteland of undeserving detritus,” has become “a fertile paradise… a commons”.

The revolution brought by the Web 2.0 has called for a Copyright 2.0. This call is urged, as Marco Ricolfi put it at the first Communia conference, by the fact that:

"…the social and technological basis of creation has been radically transformed. The time has come for us to finally become aware that, in our post-post-industrial age, the long route which used to lead the work from its creator to the public by passing through different categories of businesses is gradually being replaced by a short route, which puts in direct contact creators and the public."