Enclosing the Commons of the Mind

Did you know that we have scores of films crumbling to dust in libraries all over the country because transferring such works to more durable media would require the permission of the copyright owners – who are nowhere to be found?

Did you know that IBM makes twice as much money from its non-copyright protected software than its patent portfolio (which is, ahem, the biggest patent portfolio in the world)?

If you didn’t know these things, you might enjoy downloading a lecture by James Boyle, the witty and urbane author of The Public Domain: Enclosing the Commons of the Mind. His topic is the vitality of the public domain to creativity. Copyright policymakers often make their decisions based on an assumption that since the purpose of copyright is to incentivize authors to create, enhanced copyright protections must lead to more creation. But, Boyle argues, this assumption is made in the absence of empirical data. He notes that the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) had until recently no economists on staff, apparently because copyright policymakers have scant regard for actual data on how their own policies might affect creative output.

The problem in Boyle’s view is that we all (copyright policymakers included) have a bias against openness. This bias is not based in reality. Who would have thought that Wikipedia would be more reliable than Britannica? Who would have thought that open-source software would be so successful (see IBM example above)? These are examples of Internet-based creative works that have flourished in the absence of conventional copyright protections. They are also creative works that have been immeasurably beneficial to humanity.

In Boyle’s words, “we built the Web for science and make it work [only] for porn, shoes and books.” That is because, although the Internet is uniquely capable of gathering together stores of information from an infinite number of inputs, we have a copyright system that often inhibits access to such information in ways that are of little benefit to authors. For example, the films crumbling to dust that I cited at the beginning of this post. Most books published after 1923 are both copyright protected and out-of-print and have outlived their economic use to their authors (many of whom are actually dead). Think of the knowledge that would be at our fingertips if we could make all this commercially unviable work available on the Internet.

Boyle’s lecture is available here. You can also go to iTunes and download it as a podcast. My synopsis does no justice to how engaging a speaker he is. You should take a listen.

PS. Appropriately, you can either buy his book on Amazon or download it for free.