James Boyle’s new book The Public Domain is now available. Boyle, a founding board member of Creative Commons, and current Chair of the CC Board, is a professor at Duke University School of Law and a seminal thinker in the field of information property rights and law. The following excerpt from James Boyle’s Preface to The Public Domain sets out issues that make this book a fundamental resource for understanding and advancing the smart mobby future of ideas:
For a set of reasons that I will explain later, “the opposite of property” is a concept that is much more important when we come to the world of ideas, information, expression, and invention. We want a lot of material to be in the public domain, material that can be spread without property rights. “The general rule of law is, that the noblest of human productions—knowledge, truths ascertained, conceptions, and ideas—become, after voluntary communication to others, free as the air to common use.”12 Our art, our culture, our science depend on this public domain every bit as much as they depend on intellectual property. The third goal of this book is to explore property’s outside, property’s various antonyms, and to show how we are undervaluing the public domain and the information commons at the very moment in history when we need them most. Academic articles and clever legal briefs cannot solve this problem alone.
Instead, I argue that precisely because we are in the information age, we need a movement—akin to the environmental movement—to preserve the public domain. The explosion of industrial technologies that threatened the environment also taught us to recognize its value. The explosion of information technologies has precipitated an intellectual land grab; it must also teach us about both the existence and the value of the public domain. This enlightenment does not happen by itself. The environmentalists helped us to see the world differently, to see that there was such a thing as “the environment” rather than just my pond, your forest, his canal. We need to do the same thing in the information environment.
We have to “invent” the public domain before we can save it. . . .
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Via Smart Mobs
Personal comment:
La question du "domaine public" abordée par un des fondateurs de Creative Commons. Même si ici le sujet paraît abordé d'un point de vue plutôt juridique (les oeuvres "tombées" dans le domaine public, les oeuvres libres de droits, la propriété intellectuelle, le copyright, etc.), c 'est une question qui nous intéresse depuis plusieurs années par rapport à l'espace public. L'extension de l'analyse du réel ("reality mining", tracking, monitoring, surveillance, etc.) mite et mine progressivement l'espace public. Celui-ci, analysé par des technologies souvent propriétaires produit des données dont on ne connait pas l'exploitation, par qui, pourquoi?
Probablement que ce livre développe des thèmes intéressants par rapport à la question général du domaine public.
A lire éventuellement dans le contexte de Globale Surveillance, projet en cours avec Eric Sadin.