On 15 January, we celebrated the Public Domain Day 2026 at the Royal Library of Belgium, bringing together advocates, academics and practitioners from a variety of backgrounds.
Like every year the expiry of copyright protection has led to many “new” heritage works entering the Public Domain. To celebrate the occasion, highlight the importance of the Public Domain and discuss current projects and initiatives, we partnered with Creative Commons, Wikimedia Europe, Wikimedia Belgium, the Europeana Foundation and Europeana Network Association, Open Nederland, CREATe, Meemoo, and Internet Archive Europe to co-host this year’s Public Domain Day. Alongside the celebrations for the Public Domain, the day also marked the 25th anniversary of Wikipedia.
Keynote
To open the event, we were pleased to welcome Bartolomeo Meletti, Senior Lecturer in Law and Head of Knowledge Exchange of CREATe – the Centre for Regulation of the Creative Economy at the University of Glasgow. Building on last year’s celebration of the Public Domain Day, Bartolomeo gave a concise presentation of the origins of the Public Domain and how its historical developments impact the Public Domain as we know it today.
What’s happening in the Public Domain
Following the opening remarks, we heard a handful of policy updates from the partner organisations about their work in and around the Public Domain.
Brigitte Vézina from Creative Commons shared the organisation’s recent work on the Open Heritage Statement (which is still up for signatories), supporting a campaign at UNESCO to adopt a declaration on Open Culture.
Ariadna Matas from Europeana presented the Copyright Working Group’s position leading up to the review of the 2019 DSM Directive, especially with regards to Article 14 and what is needed to make the provisions work in a meaningful way.
Beatrice Murch from Internet Archive Europe, announced the establishment of a European branch of the Internet Archive at their new location in Amsterdam, along with their plans for the future.
COMMUNIA Policy Advisor Leander Nielbock shared our concerns relating to the changes in the proposed Digital Omnibus to the Open Data Act and its potential impacts for open projects.
Finally, our president Paul Keller, representing Open Future, shared the organisation’s recent work on Commons DB, a registry for openly licensed and Public Domain materials.
Academic panel
This year, we welcomed our first full academic panel, moderated by by Bartolomeo Meletti from CREATe who was joined by Séverine Dusollier (Science Po), Aline Iramina, Kristofer Erickson, and Martin Kretschmer (CREATe, University of Glasgow) to discuss empirical and theoretical research on the Public Domain, with a view to informing evidence-based policy and practice.
Practitioners and communities
The afternoon program was dedicated to practitioners and community members. This year’s program featured:
- Dieter Suls and Stijn Van den Bulck, presenting their efforts on Pattern-a-thons to support making fashion designs available to everyone;
- Annabelle Shaw and Louise McAward-White from the British Film Institute, highlighting their work with their community to identify death dates to support making content available in the Public Domain;
- Bob Stein, sharing his work on how to organise “Tapestries” – an open-source tool which is able to aggregate and display collections from Wikimedia Commons, Internet Archive and Europeana;
- Wytze Koppelman from the Netherlands Institute for Sound & Vision and Carlo de Gaetano from the University of Amsterdam, presenting their work on remixing heritage to imagine a future scenario of rising sea-levels;
- Bjorn Wijers, introducing his work as a visual artist and musician and his use of “serendipity;” as well as
- Maarten Zeinstra, Wikimedia Belgium and Open Nederland, presenting the Wiki Loves Public Domain initiative, which was built in collaboration by Wikimedia Nederland, Wikimedia Belgium and Wikimedia France.
We were very happy to welcome so many attendees at the KBR and online and are already looking forward to next year. In case you were unable to join us and are curious about any of the topics, all recordings of the day are available on Vimeo.
