Une revue dédiée aux œuvres du domaine public

La Public Domain Review est une revue électronique attachée à l’Open Knowledge International (précédemment connu sous l’appellation Open Knowledge Foundation).

Résultat de l’ouverture des données sur la toile, la revue propose des contenus tombés dans le Domaine public, sélectionnés par l’équipe éditoriale. La portail participe ainsi à la signalisation et la promotion auprès du grand public des ressources disponibles et a construit sa réputation grâce à l’angle ludique adopté. Ce qui ne veut en aucun cas dire que la qualité des textes est compromise; au contraire, la revue propose une rubrique intitulée Essais, dans laquelle des auteurs confirmés et des jeunes chercheurs peuvent publier leurs travaux suivant des normes éditoriales préétablies à condition que les œuvres traités appartiennent au domaine public.  

 

Au-delà de la richesse des contenus, du plaisir esthétique donné par les illustrations et des textes proposés, la véritable valeur ajoutée de la Public Domain Review est l’actualisation de la question des droits d’auteur à l’ère numérique.

Generally speaking all works eventually fall out of copyright and when they do they enter that vast commons of shared material called the “public domain”. However, different countries have different laws about when this happens (in this sense there can be seen, at some level, to actually be many different ‘public domains’). Also, digital copies of these public domain works sometimes have copyright attached to them (or restrictions applied on their use), regardless of the fact that the underlying work is in the public domain. Rights and licenses applying to public domain works can therefore be divided into two broad categories:

1. The rights status of the underlying work, by which is meant the actual original work itself (the words of a book, the actual physical painting or drawing, a musical score, etc).
2. The rights status of the digital copy, by which is meant the digital reproduction of this original work (the scan, photograph, digitisation etc., i.e. the medium by which the underlying work makes its way onto screens and the internet).

Whether there should be a distinction between the two is a source of much legal debate – and whether one can actually legally apply copyright to a simple digital reproduction of out-of-copyright work is highly questionable. We at The Public Domain Review, for purposes of transparency and utility, have labelled the digital copies we feature with the particular ‘rights status’ which is claimed by the digitising institution (be that explicit or hidden in a “Terms of Use” statement), regardless of whether we agree or not with the principle, or whether or not such claims would actually stand up in a court of law. We also have done so to facilitate the process of attribution which, we think, can be very reasonably requested by the digitising institution which has put much time and effort into the process of bringing these public domain works to our screens. Getting institutions to share their digital copies of public domain works under open licenses is something we are hoping to encourage, and something our sister project OpenGLAM is doing a wonderful job at. To see what we mean by ‘open’ visit: opendefinition.org .