Enclosing the commons of the mind

April 7th, 2009

Underlying all property law is the question: How is wealth created? Obviously, every innovation has an individual component and a social component: inspiration plus tradition. Every original creation, James Boyle observes, is “built from the resources of the public domain – language, culture, genre, scientific community, or what have you.” Artists and inventors must eat, so they must have enough control over their creations to reap some financial reward. But unlimited control could make their work unavailable to future artists and inventors, diminishing everyone’s welfare….Taking off from a masterly analysis of Ray Charles’s “I Got a Woman,” Boyle demonstrates that hardly any 20th-century American popular culture could have come into being under today’s copyright laws.

James Boyle presents ideas around his book The Public Domain: enclosing the commons of the mind at the RSA in March this year. Download the book.

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