Public Domain - Book

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Book: James Boyle. The Public Domain: Enclosing the Commons of the Mind.

URL = http://www.thepublicdomain.org/

Download free via http://www.thepublicdomain.org/download/


Description

"Our music, our culture, our science, and our economic welfare all depend on a delicate balance between those ideas that are controlled and those that are free, between intellectual property and the public domain. In The Public Domain: Enclosing the Commons of the Mind James Boyle introduces readers to the idea of the public domain and describes how it is being tragically eroded by our current copyright, patent, and trademark laws. In a series of fascinating case studies, Boyle explains why gene sequences, basic business ideas and pairs of musical notes are now owned, why jazz might be illegal if it were invented today, why most of 20th century culture is legally unavailable to us, and why today's policies would probably have smothered the World Wide Web at its inception. Appropriately given its theme, the book will be sold commercially but also made available online for free under a Creative Commons license." [1]


Review

Glyn Moody:

"Boyle's latest book offers a coherent and illuminating history of intellectual monopolies in recent times. In particular, it offers the best explanations I have come across of the Napster and Grokster cases in the US that did so much to define the legal landscape for file sharing, and of the hugely-important Digital Millennium Copyright Act, later exported to Europe.

These early chapters provide the context in which Boyle discusses key developments in the online world, and how the ideas behind old-style “intellectual property” struggle to cope with them. There is a fascinating section on mash-ups, and how this new kind of creativity is threatened by the inappropriate rules that intellectual monopolies attempt to enforce, and another that writes glowingly about free software.

Another virtue of the book is that Boyle is well acquainted with the European intellectual monopoly landscape, and writes extensively about it here; this makes his book more than usually germane for UK readers. For example, there is a comparison of the US and European approaches to copyrighting databases of factual information – not possible in the US, but allowed in the EU. This provides a perfect test case for the underlying theory of intellectual monopolies that granting more of them leads to more innovation and more creativity." (http://www.computerworlduk.com/community/blogs/index.cfm?entryid=1579&blogid=14)


Excerpt

From the preface:

"For a set of reasons that I will explain later, “the opposite of property” is a concept that is much more important when we come to the world of ideas, information, expression, and invention. We want a lot of material to be in the public domain, material that can be spread without property rights. “The general rule of law is, that the noblest of human productions—knowledge, truths ascertained, conceptions, and ideas—become, after voluntary communication to others, free as the air to common use.”12 Our art, our culture, our science depend on this public domain every bit as much as they depend on intellectual property. The third goal of this book is to explore property’s outside, property’s various antonyms, and to show how we are undervaluing the public domain and the information commons at the very moment in history when we need them most. Academic articles and clever legal briefs cannot solve this problem alone.


Instead, I argue that precisely because we are in the information age, we need a movement—akin to the environmental movement—to preserve the public domain. The explosion of industrial technologies that threatened the environment also taught us to recognize its value. The explosion of information technologies has precipitated an intellectual land grab; it must also teach us about both the existence and the value of the public domain. This enlightenment does not happen by itself. The environmentalists helped us to see the world differently, to see that there was such a thing as “the environment” rather than just my pond, your forest, his canal. We need to do the same thing in the information environment.

We have to “invent” the public domain before we can save it. . . ." (http://www.smartmobs.com/2008/11/30/the-public-domain-by-james-boyle/)