James Boyle is William Neal Reynolds Professor of Law at
Duke Law School and founder of the
Center for the Study of the Public Domain. Professor Boyle was one of the original Board Members of
Creative Commons, which works to facilitate the free availability of art, scholarship, and cultural materials by developing innovative, machine-readable licenses that individuals and institutions can attach to their work.
His book The Public Domain: Enclosing the Commons of the Mind is a must read. He posts the book online, for free PDF download, purchase, and for reading in HTML. Chapter 8 is entitled “A Creative Commons”:
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 framing of your query. Nestled among the choices that allow you to pick your desired language, or exclude raunchy content, is an option that says “usage rights.” Click “free to use or share” and then search for “physics textbook” and you can download a 1,200-page physics textbook, copy it, or even print it out and hand it to your students. Search for “Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom” and you will find Cory Doctorow’s fabulous science fiction novel, online, in full, for free.
admin Miscellaneous copyright, law, public domain
Richard Smith’s commentary at guardian.co.uk speaks against the “draconian beefing-up of copyright law [as] a collossal cultural mistake”. Seventy years until intellectual property goes into the public domain is just too long.
The result may be that libraries – which Boyle declared as “radical institutions” that have for centuries made cultural objects available to all human beings – will become mausoleums, full only of objects. They will not be able to digitise and distribute free to everybody everywhere the cultural objects of most of the 20th century, the century that formed our world.
Smith’s post links to a number of good resources.
admin Miscellaneous copyright, public domain