Upphovsrätt v Public domain
Eva Hemmungs-Wirtén
My presentation – in large part based on my new book Terms of Use: Negotiating the Jungle of the Intellectual Commons (Toronto: The University of Toronto Press, 2008) - concerns the relationship between copyright and the public domain. The New Shorter Oxford English Dictionary defines something in the public domain as “belonging to the public as a whole, esp. not subject to copyright.” Lawrence Lessig talks about a “lawyer-free zone,” but when it comes to the academic study of the public domain it is a “lawyer-free zone” remarkably crowded with lawyers. Making sense of the public domain is not made any easier by the increasing presence and use of the term “the commons” – as in Creative Commons and Science Commons - in the vernacular of intellectual property debates. In my presentation I will attempt to trace the historical roots of these two concepts from rural to digital space, first to the urban nineteenth-century movement The Commons Preservation Society (founded in London in 1865) and then further backwards into the enclosure movement, customary rights and The Diggers.
