Opposite of Property

* Article / FOREWORD THE OPPOSITE OF PROPERTY? JAMES BOYLE. LAW AND CONTEMPORARY PROBLEMS Volume 66 Winter/Spring 2003 Numbers 1 & 2.

URL = https://law.duke.edu/boylesite/foreword.pdf

"In November of 2001, Duke University School of Law held a conference on the public domain; the “outside” of the intellectual property system, the material that is free for all to use and to build upon. So far as we could tell, this was the first conference on the subject."

Summary

Based on the reading notes of Michel Bauwens, 2005:

The public domain can be defined as the 'outside of the intellectual property system', the material that is free for all to use and to build upon.

The questions are:

- What makes 'commom pool management' more efficient than legal monopolies ?

- How is the public domain similar to and different from, the idea of the commons ?

The First Enclosure movement targeted arable laqnd; the Second Enclosure aims for the expansion of IP.

Skepticism of IP is expressed in three 'languages':

- anti-monopolistic sentiment'

- pro public domain

- the use of the language of the commons to defend the possibility of distributed methods of non-proprietary production

"The prehistory of copyright was not total freedom, but rather a set of guild publishing privileges that produced of framework of pervasive regulation. Not only did copyright law make many works more freely available, its structure and rationale invited the first reflections on the countervailing claims of civil society. In both practice and rhetoric - as Rose puts its nicely - "copyright and the pubic domain were born together." (p. 4)

This means that the Commons were not a free for all but a cultural construction.

Boyle casts a defense of the public domain on the model of the environmental movement: they made nature visible: we must develop an affirmative discourse that makes the Public Domain a prominent part of the social and cultural landscape.

Carol Rose says, in comparing Tangible Space and Intellectual Space: