©ollectanea

Peter Suber, Open Access News reports that the EU has just provided 1M euros in funding for a project to explore issues related to the public domain in a digital age. One million euros! That is a lot of money.
Works in the public domain enjoy much attention these days because of the new opportunities that digital networks offer us to draw upon this public store of knowledge. As a result, problems with accessing and using this public resource that seemed tolerable in the past now seem glaringly unacceptable: a term that lasts as much as or more than 100 years for most works, even works that have so little economic value that their owners have not bothered to keep up with the works or make them available commercially (that would be almost all protected works...); we lack efficient ways to make copyright determinations for U.S. works that required renewal; the consequences for an error regarding such determinations can be catastrophic (statutory damages for infringement).
These and many other issues are prompting a number of efforts to work out technical solutions (for example, work flows for determining copyright status) and, as illustrated by the EU project, to assess the direction our copyright laws should take to encourage a fuller use of these materials without undermining the incentive the laws provide to authors, or the rights to integrity and attribution more clearly embedded in European and Latin American copyright laws (moral rights).
As a Google Book Search Library Partner, the University of Texas at Austin shares concern about the public's ability to make full use of public domain works, in particular those that have been digitized in our Benson Latin American Collection. We recently launched a public domain project focusing on the work flow to identify authors of Benson collection items whose works are in the public domain. At first we viewed the project in terms of improving access to the works themselves, but as we have gotten into the details of devising a process, it seems clear that the process itself has the greater value. We are concentrating on 3 or 4 countries now, even though the Benson collection has volumes from many more countries. We expect that by carefully documenting our process, making it public on a Website and commenting on aspects of it through a project blog, and collaborating with other Google partners and seeking input from others who are tackling similar projects, we will be able to add to the store of knowledge about how to improve access to not only our own books, but those of many other libraries (and even those belonging to individuals -- check out Siva's reference to the Open Library Project).
A fellow graduate student at UT Austin's School of Information, Maria Gonzalez, is doing the lion's share of the work to create the work flow and collect the data that will document both our process and the status of each work we analyze. We are very excited about the project and I hope to be able to announce the launch of the project Website and blog soon.