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Copyright (C) 2008 by James Boyle.
The Public Domain
Enclosing the Commons of the Mind
by James Boyle
In this enlightening book James Boyle describes what he callsthe range wars of the information age—today's heated battlesover intellectual property. Boyle argues that just as everyinformed citizen needs to know at least something about theenvironment or civil rights, every citizen should alsounderstand intellectual property law. Why? Because intellectualproperty rights mark out the ground rules of the informationsociety, and today's policies are unbalanced, unsupported byevidence, and often detrimental to cultural access, free speech,digital creativity, and scientific innovation.
Boyle identifies as a major problem the widespread failure tounderstand the importance of the public domain—the realm ofmaterial that everyone is free to use and share withoutpermission or fee. The public domain is as vital to innovationand culture as the realm of material protected by intellectualproperty rights, he asserts, and he calls for a movement akin tothe environmental movement to preserve it. With a clear analysisof issues ranging from Jefferson's philosophy of innovation tomusical sampling, synthetic biology and Internet file sharing,this timely book brings a positive new perspective to importantcultural and legal debates. If we continue to enclose the"commons of the mind," Boyle argues, we will all be the poorer.
Professor James Boyle's website: www.thepublicdomain.org
James Boyle is William Neal Reynolds Professor of Law and co-founder of the Center for the Study of the Public Domain DukeLaw School. He joined the faculty in July 2000. He has alsotaught at American University, Yale, Harvard, and the Universityof Pennsylvania Law School. He is the author of Shamans,Software and Spleens: Law and Construction of the InformationSociety and The Shakespeare Chronicles, a novel about the searchfor the true author of Shakespeare's works. He co-authored BoundBy Law, (CSPD 2006) an educational comic book on fair use indocumentary film, and is the editor of Critical Legal Studies(Dartmouth/NYU Press 1994), and Collected Papers on the PublicDomain (Duke: L&CP 2003). In 2003 he won the World TechnologyAward for Law for his work on the "intellectual ecology" of thepublic domain, and on the new "enclosure movement" thatthreatens it; (a disappointing amount of which was foretold inhis 1996 New York Times article on the subject.) ProfessorBoyle has written on legal and social theory, on issues rangingfrom political correctness to constitutional interpretation andfrom the social contract to the authorship debate in law andliterature.
For the last ten years, his work has focused on intellectualproperty. His essays include The Second Enclosure Movement, astudy of the economic rhetoric of price discrimination indigital commerce, and a Manifesto on WIPO. His shorter piecesinclude Missing the Point on Microsoft, a speech to theFederalist Society called Conservatives and IntellectualProperty, and numerous newspaper articles on law, technologyand culture. His book reviews on social theory and theenvironment, the naturalistic fallacy in environmentalism, andon competing approaches to copyright have appeared in the TimesLiterary Supplement. He currently writes as an online columnistfor the Financial Times' New Economy Policy Forum. ProfessorBoyle teaches Intellectual Property, the Constitution inCyberspace, Law and Literature, Jurisprudence and Torts. He isa Boar