.../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... ...us not on the incentives alone, but on the decentraliza- tion of information processing and decision making that a market offers. Chapter 1 4 -1 ___ 0... ...ts for us? Why do we have trademark law, this “homestead law for the English language”? 4 Why not simply allow anyone to use any name or attractive sy... ...eople mistakenly to conflate these rights with those to physical property. (I outline that process and its negative consequences in the next chapter.) ... ...ory—so long as he has a reason for focusing on that commonality. Second, the language of intellectual property exists. It has politi- cal reality in t... ...as anyone has since. He starts by dismissing the idea “that inventors have a natural and exclusive right to their inventions, and not merely for their... ...l property, then, has still less of a claim to some permanent, absolute, and natural status. [W]hile it is a moot question whether the origin of any k... ...l. In my opinion, the answer to questions one and two is no, for the reasons outlined in Chapter 4’s analysis of the Internet Threat. Yes, cheaper cop...

...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...