...McPherson, August 13, 1813, p. 6. 37278_u00.qxd 8/28/08 11:04 AM Page ii James Boyle The Public Domain Enclosing the Commons of the Mind Yale Uni... .../08 11:04 AM Page ii James Boyle The Public Domain Enclosing the Commons of the Mind Yale University Press New Haven & London ___-1 ___0 ___ 1 372... ...8 by James Boyle. All rights reserved. The author has made an online version of this work available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial... ...t ten years. None of that work has been done alone. As a result, the list of people to whom I am indebted makes Oscar night acknowledgments look haiku... ...creative commons” with private tools—of allowing creative collaboration with people you have never met—has shaped this book far beyond the chapter dev... ...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... ...ould not have thought that one could patent the idea of having an electronic Dutch auction on the Internet, working out the daily prices of a bundle o... ... What is likely to happen if the copy- right of one of these books should by descent or transfer come into the possession of some hostile zealot?” Mac...

...e ideas that are controlled and those that are free, between intellectual property and the public domain. In 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 fascinat...