The Management of Copyright on the Internet – the Public Institutions’ Perspective

Research examined the possibilities of making publicly available through internet scientific, educational and cultural works which are commissioned or financed by the Slovene state or make part of public collections in libraries, museums, archives etc. Open access to such works is important for overall economic and social development: for the transfer of knowledge and the transparency of public funding as well as an encouragement for cultural and scientific development of society. The institutions and individuals involved (public commissioners, creators and users of authors’ works, libraries …) are paralyzed by copyright restrictions; therefore a coordinated social plan is needed on various social levels: from the modifications of law and (working, commission) contracts to the modifications of public supporting schemes and the introduction of new assignments for public institutions in order to enable them to continue their work in public interest in the digital era. The presupposition of the research was that open access models can not be simply adopted from somewhere else and brought to the Slovenia because of specific historical, social and economic ways of financing, creating, and distributing scientific, educational, and cultural works. For this reason, the research had to fulfill two tasks: firstly, the sociological analysis of the state-of-the-art (classification of authors’ works in concern, identification of social agents and analysis of the conditions of work). On the basis of these assessments lawyers prepared legal solutions for the establishment of various open access models for scientific, educational, and cultural works.

Project leader: Maja Breznik
Project coworkers: Matija Damijan, Maja Bogataj Jančič, Matej Kovačič and Aldo Milohnić