The Public Domain Quotes

“The public domain is not some gummy residue left behind when all the good stuff has been covered by property law. The public domain is the place we quarry the building blocks of our culture. It is, in fact, the majority of our culture.”
― James Boyle, The Public Domain: Enclosing the Commons of the Mind : Annotated Edition

“In U.S. law, fair uses are stated quite clearly to be limitations on the exclusive rights of the copyright holder—uses that were never within the copyright holder’s power to prohibit. The defense is not ‘I trespassed on your land, but I was starving.’ It is ‘I did not trespass on your land. I walked on the public road that runs through it, a road you never owned in the first place.’ When society hands out the right to the copyright holder, it carves out certain areas of use and refuses to hand over control of them.”
― James Boyle, The Public Domain: Enclosing the Commons of the Mind : Annotated Edition

“Perhaps the romantic author does not create out of thin air. Perhaps he or she is deeply embedded in a literary, musical, cultural, or scientific tradition that would not flourish if treated as a set of permanently walled private plots. . . . the sacred genius of authors might both require a certain level of freedom in knowledge inputs and a certain level of control over knowledge outputs.”
― James Boyle, The Public Domain: Enclosing the Commons of the Mind : Annotated Edition