A Copyright Gambit: On the Need for Exclusive Rights in Digitised Versions of Public Domain Textual Materials in Europe

European memory institutions are repositories of a wealth of rare documents that record public domain content. These documents are often stored in ‘dark-archives’ to which members of the public are granted limited access, resulting in the public domain content recorded therein being relegated to a form of ‘forgotten-knowledge’. Digitisation offers a means by which such public domain content can be made speedily and easily accessible to users around the world. For this reason, it has been ha...