THE public domain is all the rage. It is invoked to breach copyright’s encroaching enclosure of what one might grandiloquently call the cultural commons of the mind. The heralds of our “remix culture” deploy the public domain to smash that icon of the entertainment–industrial complex, the Romantic Author. But even before the Author became Romantic, he still served as a shill for concentrated industry, then the printing–bookselling complex. Authors’ moral claims of labourious entitlement merely masked the power grab of the printers. If we speak of a grab, we imply that copyright was seised from somewhere. So whence, in this account, was copyright wrested? From the public domain.
The public domain: enclosing the commons of the mind