The European Commission has published a review of the Europeana digital library (remember that?). There's one critically important section, which touches on the hot issue of digitising public domain content:

It used to be that you could safely assume a work was public domain unless there was a highly visible warning printed on it, containing both the copyright owner and the date of copyright (at least in the USA). This system also ensured that, when the work’s copyright expired, you could tell from any copy that this was so—by simply adding the duration of copyright to the date printed in the work’s copyright notice. The Berne Convention, however, changed all that by replacing the assumption of freedom with the assumption of monopoly, and it now takes extensive research to be sure a work is public domain.

Last week, the National Portrait Gallery in London, UK sent a threatening letter to a Wikimedia volunteer regarding the upload of public domain paintings to Wikimedia’s media repository, Wikimedia Commons.

"We’ve just added the seal you see at right to Creative Commons licenses that qualify as Free Culture Licenses according to the Definition of Free Cultural Works — Attribution and Attribution-ShareAlike. Public domain is not a license, but is an acceptable copyright status for free cultural works according to the Definition.

CC0 is a Creative Commons project designed to promote and protect the public domain by 1) enabling authors to easily waive their copyrights in particular works and to communicate that waiver to others, and 2) providing a means by which any person can assert that there are no copyrights in a particular work, in a way that allows others to judge the reliability of that assertion.

via digitalcitizen => Public Domain Day challenges: what effect does copyright power have on us socially?

http://www.digitalcitizen.info/2008/01/01/public-domain-day-challenges-w...

Many types of open or general public licenses govern online collaborative spaces like wikis. The popular choices seem to fall under three categories: CopyLeft, Creative Commons, and Public Domain. All open licenses allow some use of content that would normally be covered by full copyright protection.

DJB (Daniel J. Bernstein), author of qmail, djbdns has announced in a conference Sage Days 6, declared all of his past and future code will be released to public domain.

The Public Domain Manifesto has its heart in the right place as it objects to some of the unjust extensions of copyright power, so Richard Stallman wish he could support it. However, it falls far short of what is needed.