Jamie Boyle, Duke Law School Professor, the Chairman of the Board of Creative Commons, good friend and one of most interesting and articulate scholars on copyright, free culture and the public domain has just released a new book called The Public Domain: Enclosing the Commons of the Mind.

You can download the whole book for free as well as buy it if you like. ;-)

I'm still only part of the way through, but it is classic Boyle and a joy to read and full of great thoughts.

The Public Domain

Our music, our culture, our science, and our economic welfare all depend on a delicate balance between those ideas that are controlled and those that are free, between intellectual property and the public domain. In The Public Domain: Enclosing the Commons of the Mind James Boyle introduces readers to the idea of the public domain and describes how it is being tragically eroded by our current copyright, patent, and trademark laws. In a series of fascinating case studies, Boyle explains why gene sequences, basic business ideas and pairs of musical notes are now owned, why jazz might be illegal if it were invented today, why most of 20th century culture is legally unavailable to us, and why today's policies would probably have smothered the World Wide Web at its inception. Appropriately given its theme, the book will be sold commercially but also made available online for free under a Creative Commons license.