While the festive season is upon us, at CREATe we are already preparing for stimulating policy conversations early in the new year. On 15 January 2026, a delegation from CREATe will join European Public Domain Day 2026 at the Royal Library of Belgium in Brussels. The event will bring together cultural heritage practitioners, primary creators, policy-makers, advocates and academics for a series of talks, discussions, and hands-on workshops about the public domain.
Intérieur au phonographe (1924), by Henri Matisse. Source: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Int%C3%A9rieur_au_phonographe,_par_Henri_Matisse.jpg
The event will begin with a keynote by Bartolomeo Meletti, who will set the stage by exploring the origins and meanings of the concept of the public domain. This will be followed by a series of updates by key organisations that continue to shape the public domain through advocacy and practical initiatives: Creative Commons, Europeana, Internet Archive Europe, Communia and CommonsDB. After these updates, an academic panel organised by CREATe will discuss evidence-based policy-making on the public domain. Martin Kretschmer, Kristofer Erickson and Aline Iramina will be joined by leading public domain scholar Séverine Dusollier. Each speaker will present one research-based policy recommendation, followed by a discussion with all the morning’s presenters.
The date of the event is quite symbolic: it will mark the 25th anniversary of the launch of Wikipedia (on the same day in 2001), the foundation of Creative Commons, and the adoption of the Information Society Directive (2001/29/EC). CREATe has produced innovative empirical evidence about the Value of the Public Domain, and we continue to investigate these areas through a variety of activities, including our projects under the research themes Access to Knowledge and Legal History & Cultural Memory. We look forward to the discussion and we hope you can join us, whether in person or online (registration link here).