Reimagining the Public Domain

In a paper included among this collection of works from the Duke Law School’s Conference on the Public Domain, James Boyle kindly credits an early essay of mine, Recognizing the Public Domain, with having contributed initially to the contemporary study of the subject. Boyle quotes a passage from that essay in which I suggested that "recognition of new intellectual property interests should be offset today by equally deliberate recognition of individual rights in the public domain . . . . Each [intellectual property] right ought to be marked off clearly against the public domain."