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Whether a work can be freely reused ought to be a simple question to answer. In practice it rarely is. Information about copyright status—whether something is in the public domain, or available under an open license—is scattered across catalogs, collection pages and terms-of-use notices, is frequently incomplete, and is almost never machine-readable. Works that are free to use are hard to find, and harder still to reuse with confidence. The digital commons is vast, but largely invisible to the systems that would put it to work.
The CommonsDB project was set up to test a solution. Over the past eighteen months we have built a working registry in which rights holders and cultural heritage institutions can declare works as public domain or openly licensed, using the International Standard Content Code (ISCC) to identify content from the content itself rather than from a filename or a web address — so that a declaration stays attached to a work wherever a copy of it travels. Almost 6.5 million works have now been declared in the prototype, exceeding the project’s five million target. Building a registry has turned out to be the easier part. The harder question (who should operate infrastructure of this kind, and on what basis?) is the one the project ends on.
The CommonsDB project’s final conference marks its end and looks ahead to the future of EU copyright infrastructure. The conference will take place on September 14, 2026 in Alicante, Spain. This one-day event will be livestreamed, and a recording will be available online afterward.
The conference will combine strategic discussions with practical presentations of CommonsDB outcomes, demonstrating how scalable registry concepts can fit into the broader copyright landscape.
As part of the CommonsDB consortium, Open Future co-organizes the conference alongside Liccium, the Europeana Foundation, Wikimedia Sverige, and the Institute for Information Law (IViR), continuing our work on infrastructure that supports openness and the digital commons.
10:00 | Welcome and opening remarks Harrie Temmink (EUIPO)
An introduction to the EUIPO’s work under the Copyright Knowledge Centre, and the Centre’s role as a neutral EU-level hub connecting information resources, stakeholders, and technical solutions in the AI era – including support for cultural heritage institutions through the Out-of-Commerce Works Portal and the Orphan Works Database.
10:15 CEST | Session 1: CommonsDB project results Doug McCarthy (Open Future), Karin Glasemann (Wikimedia Sverige), and Sebastian Posth (Liccium)
A launch-style presentation of the project’s main achievements. Consortium members show how the CommonsDB prototype processed over 5 million declarations from multiple data providers within 18 months.
11:15 CEST | Coffee break
11:30 CEST | Session 2: State of the ISCC Panelists: Carlos Luna García (EUIPO), Hugo Manguinhas (Europeana), Titusz Pán (ISCC Foundation), Sebastian Posth (Liccium), and Philippe Rixhon Moderator: Paul Keller (Open Future)
A panel on technology and architecture that assesses CommonsDB as the first at-scale public prototype registry built on the ISCC. The discussion covers practical institutional workflows, lessons from CommonsDB’s development, and emerging technical solutions for federated, multi-registry discoverability.
13:00 CEST | Lunch break
14:00 CEST | Session 3: EU copyright infrastructure and strategy Panelists: Krzysztof Nichczynski (European Commission – DG CNECT), João Pedro Quintais (IViR), Luna Schumacher (Pictoright), Anna Vuopala (CITF), and an AI developer (to be confirmed) Moderator: Paul Keller (Open Future)
A panel on Text and Data Mining (TDM) opt-out registries and the wider outlook for EU copyright infrastructure. It includes a presentation by European Commission staff on a recent study into the feasibility of a central registry for TDM opt-outs.
15:30 CEST | Coffee break
15:45 CEST | Closing remarks Paul Keller (Open Future) and a representative from the European Commission (to be confirmed)
Final reflections on the day and future directions.
Click here to register for the livestream.
The CommonsDB final conference is co-funded by the European Union under the 2023 work programme on the financing of Pilot Projects and Preparatory Actions in the field of Communications Networks, Content and Technology. It is hosted by the EUIPO in Alicante, in the context of its Copyright Knowledge Centre, a neutral platform for cooperation on copyright at EU level.
