I will attend the Communia conference on Public Domain in the digital age, because I am the co-author of a paper on The Value of Registering Creative Works.

The question why an author should register a work at all is rendered obvious by the conference title “Public Domain in the Digital Age”. A while ago I argued that Copyright is misused by people who are anxious to appropriate public knowledge and call it private property. Isn’t it a contradiction that now I argue that it can be valuable that people can register a work by associating a machine readable identifier with a complex idea?

I notice that in a digital media environment which is increasingly dominated by private interests, such Autonomous Domains could become necessary to defend free public access to content. Of course, at first this may look like overkill, but with a distributed infrastructure for managing copyright, users could register works from the Public Domain and by releasing them under a CC license make sure that they can be found and accessed easily.

I nominated DirectFB as a candidate for the Sourceforge Community Choice awards, because this project is crucial for keeping the technology of digital media devices and services open to individual users. DirectFB is dedicated to creating a truly open standard for graphics, middleware and audiovisual applications for CE devices. The DirectFB 1.0 specification has been adopted by the Consumer Electronics Linux Forum (CELF) as an industry standard. Major CE manufacturers are CELF members.