The Public Domain: Enclosing the Commons of the Mind

in France. Here, at the supposed heart of the natural rights tradition, we find thinkers driven inexorably to consider the question of limits. How far does the supposed natural...

So far, I have talked about the root ideas of intellectual property. I have talked about its history, about the way it influences and is influenced by technology. I have talked...

The conventional wisdom is that governments respond slowly to technological change. In the case of the Internet, nothing could be further from the truth. In 1994 and 1995, "dot-...

On August 13, 1813, Thomas Jefferson took up his pen to write to Isaac McPherson.1 It was a quiet week in Jefferson's correspondence. He wrote a letter to Madison about the appo...

Imagine that a bustling group of colonists has just moved into a new area, a huge, unexplored plain. (Again, assume the native inhabitants have conveniently disappeared.) Some o...

One group of scientists describes a system that is fundamentally open: open protocols and open systems so that anyone could connect to the system and offer information or produc...

Creative Commons was conceived as a private "hack" to produce a more fine-tuned copyright structure, to replace "all rights reserved" with "some rights reserved" for those who w...

Imagine yourself starting a society from scratch. Perhaps you fought a revolution, or perhaps you led a party of adventurers into some empty land, conveniently free of indigenou...

are not like physical property rights. In analyzing the DMCA, where do we turn for analogies? To physical property, violence, and theft. The cases analyzing the DMCA are full of...

offered to license the white pages listings from Rural is because they (mistakenly) thought they were copyrighted. This is unlikely. Most good copyright lawyers would have told...

These rulings and others like them meant that software was protected by copyright, as Mr. Gates wanted, but that the copyright did not give its owner the right to prevent functi...

Perhaps some of the arguments in this book have convinced you. Perhaps it is a mistake to think of intellectual property in the same way we think of physical property. Perhaps l...

The law locks up the man or woman Who steals the goose from off the common But leaves the greater villain loose Who steals the common from off the goose. 2

out of the statute--it undermines the supposedly clear rule. If the factors of fair use are seriously applied, how can a three- note excerpt ever fail to be fair use? And if we...

Over the last forty years, much has changed in the way that scientific research and technological development are organized, funded, and institutionally arranged. Much has also...

If you go to the familiar Google search page and click the intimidating link marked "advanced search," you come to a page that gives you more fine-grained control over the frami...

Over the last fifteen years, a group of scholars have finally persuaded economists to believe something noneconomists find obvious: "behavioral economics" shows that people do n...

is now a potential infringer, a potentially infectious virus carrier, he is ill disposed to listen to claims about fair use. Civil liberties claims do not do very well in epidem...