Page:The digital public domain.pdf/67

40 Information and Orphan Works), encompassing national libraries, publishers, writers’ organisations and collective management organisations, aspires to find ways to identify rights-holders and rights, clear the status of a work, or possibly acknowledge the public domain status of a work. Finally, the Digital Research Infrastructure for the Arts and Humanities (DARIAH) aims to enhance and support digitally-enabled research across the humanities and the arts.

With the support of the Open Knowledge Foundation, the UK government announced the launch of www.data.gov.uk, a collection of more than 2,500 UK government databases, which is now freely available to the public for consultation and reuse. The Open Knowledge Foundation launched the Public Domain Calculators project as part of the Public Domain Works project, an open registry of artistic works that are in the public domain. The Public Domain Calculators project, presented at the third Communia workshop, creates an algorithm to determine whether a certain work is in the public domain based on certain details, such as date of publication, date of death of author, etc. The activities and goals of the Open Knowledge Foundation, a very active Communia member, were presented at the first Communia workshop.

Many other civic society endeavours have been working toward the goal of promoting open access and safeguarding the public domain throughout Europe. Among them, La Quadrature du Net, an advocacy group that promotes the rights and freedoms of citizens on the Internet, is very active within and outside of the Communia network. The European Association for Public Domain was recently initiated as a project to promote and defend the public domain. Again, Knowledge Exchange is a co-operative effort run by European libraries and research foundations that supports the goal of making a layer of scholarly and scientific content openly available on