The Public Domain
![handle is hein.journals/emlj39 and id is 979 raw text is: EMORY LAW JOURNAL
Volume 39 FALL 1990 Number 4
ARTICLES
THE PUBLIC DOMAIN
Jessica Litman*
Artists have been deluding themselves, for centuries, with the no-
tion that they create. In fact they do nothing of the sort.
Spider Robinson'
Our copyright law is based on the charming notion that authors create
something from nothing, that works owe their origin2 to the authors who
produce them.' Arguments for strengthening copyright protection,
whether predicated on a theory of moral deserts4 or expressed in terms of
* Associate Professor of Law, Wayne State University. The author would like to thank
Jonathan Weinberg, Martin Adelman, Jane Ginsburg, Ralph Brown, Wendy Gordon, Fred Yen, and
Harry Litman, as well as her former colleagues - too numerous to list individually - at the Univer-
sity of Michigan Law School, for their extensive and valuable comments on earlier drafts of this
article.
S. ROBINSON, Melancholy Elephants, in MELANCHOLY ELEPHANTS 1, 16 (1985).
See I M. NIMMER & D. NIMMER, NIMMER ON COPYRIGHT § 2.01[A], at 2-8.1 (1989).
3 See id. § 1.06[A).
See, e.g., Gordon, An Inquiry into the Merits of Copyright: The Challenges of Consistency,
Consent and Encouragement Theory, 41 STAN. L. REv. 1343, 1442-65 (1989); Ladd, The Harm of
the Concept of Harm in Copyright, 30 J. COPYRIGHT Soc'Y U.S.A. 421 (1983).](ViewImageLocal?handle=hein.journals/emlj39&div=42&collection=&method=preview&ext=.png&size=3)
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