Document Type
Book
Publication Date
2008
Abstract
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 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.
Citation
James Boyle, The Public Domain: Enclosing the Commons of the Mind (Yale University Press, 2008)
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 License.
Library of Congress Subject Headings
Open source software, Internet, World Wide Web, Creative Commons (Organization), Public domain, Open access publishing, Inventions
Included in
Available at: https://scholarship.law.duke.edu/faculty_scholarship/2708