.../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... ...van book. For more information, visit www.caravanbooks.org. Copyright © 2008 by James Boyle. All rights reserved. The author has made an online versio... ...8 by James Boyle. All rights reserved. The author has made an online version of this work available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial... ... the last 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 lo... ...out the excesses of intel- lectual property. Some of them are even true. The list goes on and on. (By the end of this book, I hope to have convinced y... ...hat is not yet owned—such as a seashell on a public beach, about to be taken home? Or stuff that cannot be owned— a human being, for example? Or stuff... ...e world to the danger posed by climate change, or a passion- ate advocate of homeschooling, or a cartoonist with a uniquely twisted view of life, or a... ...r. So how are things different today? If you are a person who routinely uses computers, the Internet, or digital media, imagine a day when you do not ... ...material played on those systems—so that songs can be licensed to particular computers at particular times. Uses that the owners wish to forbid will a...

...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...