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Ginsburg, Jane --- "'Une chose publique?' The author's domain and the public domain in early British, french and US copyright law" [2007] ELECD 298; in Torremans, Paul (ed), "Copyright Law" (Edward Elgar Publishing, 2007)

Book Title: Copyright Law

Editor(s): Torremans, Paul

Publisher: Edward Elgar Publishing

ISBN (hard cover): 9781845424879

Section: Chapter 6

Section Title: 'Une chose publique?' The author's domain and the public domain in early British, french and US copyright law

Author(s): Ginsburg, Jane

Number of pages: 28

Extract:

6 `Une chose publique'? The author's domain
and the public domain in early British,
French and US copyright law
Jane Ginsburg1



Introduction
The public domain is all the rage.2 It is invoked to breach copyright's
encroaching enclosure of the cultural commons of the mind. The heralds of
our `remix culture'3 deploy the public domain to smash that icon of the enter-
tainment­industrial 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.4 Authors' moral claims of laborious

1 Morton L. Janklow Professor of Literary and Artistic Property Law,
Columbia University School of Law. This is a shorter version of an article published in
Cambridge Law Journal 65, 636 (2006), which in turn was based on the Inaugural
Emmanuel College International Intellectual Property Lecture, delivered at Emmanuel
College, University of Cambridge, 11 May 2006. Many thanks for research assistance
to Matthew Batters, Columbia Law School class of 2006, without whom this project
could not have been completed, and to Caleb Edwards, Columbia Law School class of
2008 and Christina Jodidio, University of Paris II class of 2007. Thanks also to Clarisa
Long, Henry Monaghan, Thomas Nachbar, William R. Cornish, Lionel Bently, and
especially Anne Barron.
2 The volume of academic writing on the public domain has vastly increased
since the signal articles of David Lange, `Recognizing the Public Domain', and of
Jessica Litman, `The Public Domain'. See, e.g., Bernt ...