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Rh the Internet. Finally, it is worth noting that commercial enterprises joined the Communia network in an attempt to investigate and promote open and public domain business models.

This distributed European public domain project is an encouraging starting point. Nonetheless, much still must be done to promote sustainability in the development of our cultural environment. The commodification of information, the enclosure of the public domain, and the converse expansion of intellectual property rights tell a story of unsustainable imbalance in shaping the informational policy of the digital society. Communia is, therefore, calling for targeted policy actions to redress the informational policy of the digital society and to maximise the economic and social value that may be extracted from the public domain, especially from the digital public domain.

6. What can Europe do for the public domain?

One of the main goals of the Communia Network is to provide policy recommendations to strengthen the public domain in Europe. The Communia recommendations are principally addressed to the Commission. However, the recommendation portion of the Report has been envisioned as an agenda and stimulus to any other entity — Member States, national libraries, the publishing industry, expert groups, etc. — that may promote or influence public domain related decisions. In addition, an inner integration between public domain projects at the European level and the international level is a goal recommended by Communia. This may be easily done by strengthening a more qualified presence of the EU during discussion and negotiations of public domain issues within the WIPO Development Agenda framework.

The Communia policy recommendations seek to re-define the hierarchy of priorities embedded in the traditional politics of intellectual productions and creativity. Any public policy of creativity should promote the idea that “information is not only or mainly a commodity; it is also a critically important resource and input to learning, culture, competition, innovation and democratic discourse”. The agenda of the information society cannot be dictated by commercial interests above and beyond any of the