About | HeinOnline Law Journal Library | HeinOnline Law Journal Library | HeinOnline
LOG IN
LOG IN

18 Yale J.L. & Human. 56 (2006)
Re-Crafting a Public Domain

handle is hein.journals/yallh18 and id is 400 raw text is: Re-crafting a Public Domain Lawrence Lessig* INTRODUCTION There is a public domain, but it is small, relative to its history, and it is shrinking. Digital technology will only speed its decline. And because most are oblivious to the particular threat that digital technology poses for the public domain, the prospects for reversing this trend are not promising. On the present path, the idea of the public domain will be as familiar to our children as the intergovernmental tax immunity doctrine is to our students. This loss of the public domain, properly understood, will be a profound loss for freedom and culture, or more precisely, free culture. It will also be persistent. For the mechanisms that will effect the elimination of this domain are not merely legal doctrines. The mechanisms are machines protected by the most powerful (if delicate) technologies of control that man has devised. My aim in this essay is to frame a way of talking about this public domain, and to map a strategy for its defense. The defense will come both from rebuilding the public domain, properly understood, and from crafting an effective public domain-meaning a free space that functions as a public domain, even though the resources that constitute it are not properly within the public domain. The frame connects directly with work done long before the digital age that aimed to understand, or more precisely, to correct a misunderstanding about the commons. Yet that work, too, shares a pre-digital blindness to the problems that digital technologies create for a commons, as well as a blindness about the usable tools to correct them. Put most concisely, the reformers too are too wedded to pre-digital truths. Until they become comfortable recommending strategies that in the pre-digital age they (rightly) condemned, we will make little progress in stopping the current Professor of Law, Stanford Law School. Thanks to Richard Craswell and Mark Lemley for comments on an earlier draft. This essay is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution- Noncommercial license. See http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/2.5/.

What Is HeinOnline?

HeinOnline is a subscription-based resource containing thousands of academic and legal journals from inception; complete coverage of government documents such as U.S. Statutes at Large, U.S. Code, Federal Register, Code of Federal Regulations, U.S. Reports, and much more. Documents are image-based, fully searchable PDFs with the authority of print combined with the accessibility of a user-friendly and powerful database. For more information, request a quote or trial for your organization below.



Short-term subscription options include 24 hours, 48 hours, or 1 week to HeinOnline.

Purchase Access

Contact us for annual subscription options:

Contact Us

Already a HeinOnline Subscriber?

Log In

profiles profiles most