...rs between the types of intermediaries are blurred. Barnes and Noble (the American bookstores chain) has, in effect, become a publisher. Many publis... ... invaded the digital publishing and POD (Print on Demand) businesses in a series of lightning purchases. It is now the largest e-book store by a wid... ... writ large proved to be calamitous to the industry. In the 1970s and 1980s, evolutionary biologists like Richard Dawkins and Rupert Sheldrake d... ... The result was a globe encompassing network of academic institutions. The American Pentagon established the network of all networks, the ARPANET. Ot... ...lterior motives of members of the ruling political echelons (the infamous American Paranoia), a lack of variety and of catering to the tastes and in... ...y commercial software can still be downloaded for free. In many countries television viewers still pay for television broadcasts - but in the USA an... ... but in the USA and many other countries in the West, the basic package of television channels comes free of charge. As users / consumers form a ha... ...egins to carry a price tag. This is what happened with the advent of cable television : contents are sold for subscription or per usage (Pay Per View... ... was first introduced to electronic publishing on the Internet in the late 1980s and became intrigued by the power of this revolutionary development....

...s? Even the ones they claim to have been dictated by gods or aliens? Even if American copyright law requires “an author,” presumably a human one? 9 Ca... ...r the films of the Second World War, or footage on the daily lives of African-Americans during segregation, or the music of the Great Depression, or th... ... government position for an acquaintance, produced a fascinating and lengthy series of comments on a new “Rudiments of English Grammar,” discussed the... ...er to have an intellectual property system is only the first choice in a long series. 13 Even if one believes that intellectual property is Thomas Jeff... ...hey were successful. 36 As Yochai Benkler puts it, Alice Randall, an African American woman, was ordered by a government official not to publish her cr... ...ness plans relied upon showing movies in theaters and then licensing them to television stations. VCRs and Betamaxes fit nowhere in this plan; they wer... ...nt that it was a “fair use” under U.S. copyright law for consumers to record television programs for time-shifting purposes. Since fair The Internet T... ...s clearly disapproving, others would point out that book- stores, movies and television channels are filled with material on how to commit mur der...an... ...is song po- tentially infringes both of them. Readers who came of age in the 1980s might remember the music of Public Enemy and N.W.A.—a dense wall of...

...s 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 le...