This week marks a momentous occasion, asEuropeana— Europe’s digital library —has released20 million records into the public domain using theCC0 Public Domain Dedication. This release is the largest one-time dedication of cultural data to the public domain using CC0. The Europeana dataset consists of descriptive information from a huge trove ofdigitized cultural and artistic works. Now, per the EuropeanaTerms of Use, “all metadata (textual information on digitised cultural heritage) on the site are published without any restrictions on re-use.” The public domain data can be useful for cultural institutions, researchers, and application developers. By removing all copyright restrictions from the data, Europeana helps to promote innovation and economic activity. From thepress release:
Importantly, the change represents a valuable contribution to the European Commission’s agenda to drive growth through digital innovation. Online open data is a core resource which can fuel enterprise and create opportunities for millions of Europeans working in Europe’s cultural and creative industries. The sector represents 3.3% of EU GDP and is worth over €150 billion in exports.
Europeana’s announcement was praised byNeelie Kroes, Vice-President of the European Commission, who said:
Open data is such a powerful idea, and Europeana is such a cultural asset, that only good things can result from the marriage of the two. People often speak about closing the digital divide and opening up culture to new audiences but very few can claim such a big contribution to those efforts as Europeana’s shift to creative commons.
荷兰和卢卡塔尔vs葡萄牙分析森堡的知识共享联盟团队通过合作伙伴组织信息法研究所(IViR)、Kennisland和Bibliothèque nationale de Luxembourg在这一过程中为Europeana提供了专家支持。Europeana一直走在分享欧洲文化记录的前沿。They are one of the first adopters of CC’sPublic Domain Markand continue to support avibrant, healthy public domain.
So why don’t we just reform copyright the way the Pirate Party wants to do it?
Congratulations to those involved in Europeana for publishing metadata “without any restrictions on re-use”, and to CC for developing the enabling tool: the Public Domain Mark (with the wonderful objective of promoting a “vibrant, healthy public domain”).
I hope that Neelie Kroes will now move the focus of her attention from Europe’s rich cultural heritage to the present and to the future. A good next step would be initiatives to cajole Europe’s public service broadcasters into publishing metadata (including programme listings and data on content that they make available online) “without any restrictions on re-use”. European citizens pay for public service broadcasting, but do not have open access and unrestricted re-use rights to the metadata needed to discover, share and add value to the cultural goods that are produced on their behalf.
Good luck Neelie and CC.
– Colin Moorcraft
现在，根据Europeana的使用条款，“网站上的所有元数据(数字化文化遗产的文本信息)都可以发布，不受任何重复使用的限制。”公共领域数据对文化机构、研究人员和应用程序开发人员很有用。
Cool! That so many information can check.
我不认为这次发布是“使用CC0向公共领域一次性贡献最大的文化数据”。
In December 2011 the German Library Networks BVB and KOBV released 23 Million descriptions of bibliographic documents (as RDF and MARC/XML) under CC0, seehttp://openbiblio.net/2011/12/08/bvb-kobv-open-data/
In January, at least the German Creative Commons blog wrote about it (http://de.www.familygiver.com/2012/01/16/deutsche-bibliotheken-stellen-uber-23-millionen-metadatensatze-in-xml-unter-cczero/) but it obviously went unnoticed by the author of this post.
Adrian,once people have access, there should be some really interesting things stemming from all this.Glad to hear other cultural organizations have done it!