Book Review: The Public Domain

This book was both depressing and fabulous. Depressing because I did not realize how difficult the challenge of copyright is. Fabulous because it was written in a way that was easy to understand and Boyle's points came across with strength. It was a book that everyone involved in copyright law should read. If you want to preview the book (or even read the whole thing) you can download it at http://www.thepublicdomain.org/

Kudos to you Mr. Boyle for openly licensing your book.

The book is easy to read, and takes a complicated matter and makes it very accessible. In one sense, this book is depressing. Boyle’s logic is impeccable and I find myself feeling discouraged at the copyright laws that we have and feeling like there is no hope. I believe that most people who agree this book would agree with its conclusions, but most people (myself included) just haven’t thought about these issues carefully.

Some of the main points that were interesting to me:

• Early thinkers such as Thomas Jefferson specifically did not want intellectual property to have a lengthy copyright. The Constitution itself states that it must be limited, and Jefferson and others were clearly concerned that the limitation be no longer than what was needed to encourage innovation.
• The difference between rivalrous and non-rivalrous goods and how this relates to “the tragedy of the commons.”
• Grokster—I had never heard of this company, the Supreme Court ruled that its actions were illegal, which has inhibited legitimate growth in peer to peer exchanges.
• Had one simply imagined the Internet with the tight restrictions or way of thinking some have today with regard to copyright law it might have seemed completely ludicrous. The benefits we receive from the Internet could have been eliminated had somebody said, “this free sharing of information—sounds like a lot of potential for piracy.
• One needs to think carefully about how much harm is actually being caused by copyright violation and have a stick just big enough to address it, but not bigger.

This excerpt helped drive home the point as it applies to us today:


"Go to the Library of Congress catalogue. It is online at http://catalog.loc.gov/. This is an astounding repository of material—not just books and periodicals, but pictures, films, and music. The vast majority of this material, perhaps as much as 95 percent in the case of books, is commercially unavailable.6 The process happens comparatively quickly. Estimates suggest that a mere twenty-eight years after publication 85 percent of the works are no longer being commercially produced. (We know that when U.S. copyright required renewal after twenty-eight years, about 85 percent of all copyright holders did not bother to renew. This is a reasonable, if rough, guide to commercial viability.)7 Yet because the copyright term is now so long, in many cases extending well over a century, most of twentieth-century culture is still under copyright— copyrighted but unavailable. Much of this, in other words, is lost culture. No one is reprinting the books, screening the films, or playing the songs. No one is allowed to. In fact, we may not even know who holds the copyright. Companies have gone out of business. Records are incomplete or absent. In some cases, it is even more complicated. A film, for example, might have one copyright over the sound track, another over the movie footage, and another over the script. You get the idea. These works—which are commercially unavailable and also have no identifiable copyright holder—are called “orphan works.” They make up a huge percentage of our great libraries’ holdings. For example, scholars estimate that the majority of our film holdings are orphan works.8 For books, the estimates are similar. Not only are these works unavailable commercially, there is simply no way to find and contact the person who could agree to give permission to digitize the work or make it available in a new form" (9).

What a tragedy that so much of "copyrighted" work is no longer available. It seems to me that it is completely reasonable to have copyright last 14 years with two renewable 14 year terms (Boyle suggests a 28 year term).

Boyle does not leave the reader hopeless. His call for citizens to make efforts to unlock the commons inspired me to be more open in my own work.

Boyle gives a thorough review of copyright, and I highly recommend this book.