...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...