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Abstract:
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"In its usage to date, the term 'public domain' is elastic and inexact. A definition can be but one of many definitions, each surely a function of perspective and agenda, more or less as Boyle suggests. His own perspective, one in which he sees the expansion of intellectual property rights as 'a second enclosure movement' reminiscent of the English land enclosure movement of the Nineteenth Century, is intriguing. From this perspective, the public domain is perhaps most usefully seen as a commons, set off against the fences that delimit the interests of individual rights holders. I have no important quarrel with this perspective, and indeed think it enormously useful for many purposes -- among them, for the purposes of imagining a 'politics of the commons' while addressing common interests in cyberspace, two important areas of inquiry in which Boyle's own scholarly agenda particularly lies.
"But this public domain is not my public domain. More precisely, it is not the public domain that matters to me most. And I have thought that perhaps it would be appropriate to say a bit more fully what I had in mind when I wrote my essay some twenty years ago. This is, I think, only the second occasion when I have attempted to do so publicly, and it will certainly be the first in which I try in addition to bring my thinking from that time into some degree of harmony with my thinking today. Not that such an exercise will matter to posterity. But Boyle does raise the question of meaning in general, and I suppose that I, like others, am free to respond to the question in particular."
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