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 his award-winning new book,
The Public Domain: Enclosing the Commons of the Mind (Yale University Press)
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.
Boyle’s book is a clarion call. In the tradition of the environmental movement, which first invented and then sought to protect something
called “the environment,” Boyle hopes that we can first understand and then protect the public domain – the ecological center of the
“information environment.”
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