Public Domain Day 2026 webinar [in Polish]: Open collections and the AI training industry
Museums, archives, and libraries are noticing significantly increased traffic in their server logs. However, these are not crowds of enthusiasts who suddenly felt a passionate love for exploring cultural heritage resources, but crawlers – bots collecting training data to feed AI models at an unprecedented scale.
Repositories and media libraries of cultural institutions were created for researchers, students, and enthusiasts in mind, but today they are being overloaded by the artificial intelligence industry. On the other hand, thanks to tools such as ChatGPT or Gemini, users can reach resources they may have been previously unaware of – creating new connections, gaining leads for further research, and focusing on working with the object and its history, rather than on finding it.
As part of the Public Domain Day 2026 celebrations, we invite you to join a conversation about the new challenges and opportunities that are being faced by organisations sharing open resources online. Should cultural and scientific institutions, often financed by public funds, shoulder these unexpected operating costs? If so: will this not deter them from further digitization efforts? If not: how, in practice, could distinctions be made regarding access to the public domain and what was intended to be fully open? Should we start discussing a compensation system – and if so, what kind?
During the meeting, we will consider how to maintain full openness for individual users and researchers, while leveling the playing field in this new landscape.
Our panel discussion will be joined by experts of law, new technologies, and the cultural sector:
- Dr Zbigniew Okoń – attorney-at-law, partner at the Lubasz i Wspólnicy law firm,
- Dr Alek Tarkowski – strategy director at the Open Future Foundation,
- Karolina Tabak – head of the Digital Projects Department at the Polish History Museum,
- Marcin Dąbrowski, Project Owner of Obywatel Bielik,
- Maria Drabczyk – chair of the Centrum Cyfrowe Foundation, board member of the COMMUNIA Association.
The webinar will be held in Polish.
Register for the webinar
January 28 (Wednesday), 15:00–16:30
Participation is free, registration required → LINK
Webinar on Zoom, the event will be recorded (find more about our privacy policy here)
The event banner is based on ”Exhibition of Fine Arts in Warsaw in 1828” by Wincenty Kasprzycki (1802–1849), 1828, collection of the National Museum in Warsaw. [Public domain, via Cyfrowe MNW]