Even though there's no formal requirement to register a work to establish its copyright status, "CommonsDB is an EU-funded pilot project that has established a functional public registry of rights information for public domain and openly licensed works." This way people can verify that the open work they are using is indeed openly licensed. As the CommonsDB website states, "The registry allows anyone to check the public domain status of media files found online." But a big centralized registry is an expensive single point of failure, so the plan is to decentralize it. As this strategy paper (31 page PDF) summarizes, "The feasibility study committed the project to federation as a core design principle, and the pilot has delivered on its architectural promise. The registry includes a distributed layer, implemented as an open-source service over the Iroh peer-to-peer protocol." As so many others have discovered, "Identity is the hard part. Registries require proper authentication of the declaring party... Qualified organisational credentials remain rare among the institutions that hold relevant collections." And you need to make it cheap or nearly free to register a work as open or public domain.
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