James Boyle > Quotes

“The history of patents includes a wealth of attempts to reward friends of the government and restrict or control dangerous technologies.”
― James Boyle, The Public Domain: Enclosing the Commons of the Mind

“Given an area of law that legislators were happy to hand over to the affected industries and a technology that was both unfamiliar and threatening, the prospects for legislative insight were poor. Lawmakers were assured by lobbyists
a) that this was business as usual, that no dramatic changes were being made by the Green or White papers; or
b) that the technology presented a terrible menace to the American cultural industries, but that prompt and statesmanlike action would save the day; or
c) that layers of new property rights, new private enforcers of those rights, and technological control and surveillance measures were all needed in order to benefit consumers, who would now be able to “purchase culture by the sip rather than by the glass” in a pervasively monitored digital environment.
In practice, somewhat confusingly, these three arguments would often be combined. Legislators’ statements seemed to suggest that this was a routine Armageddon in which firm, decisive statesmanship was needed to preserve the digital status quo in a profoundly transformative and proconsumer way. Reading the congressional debates was likely to give one conceptual whiplash.
To make things worse, the press was—in 1995, at least—clueless about these issues. It was not that the newspapers were ignoring the Internet. They were paying attention—obsessive attention in some cases. But as far as the mainstream press was concerned, the story line on the Internet was sex: pornography, online predation, more pornography. The lowbrow press stopped there. To be fair, the highbrow press was also interested in Internet legal issues (the regulation of pornography, the regulation of online predation) and constitutional questions (the First Amendment protection of Internet pornography). Reporters were also asking questions about the social effect of the network (including, among other things, the threats posed by pornography and online predators).”
― James Boyle, The Public Domain: Enclosing the Commons of the Mind

“The precursor of copyright law served to force the identification of the author so that he could be punished if he proved to be a heretic or a revolutionary”
― James Boyle, The Public Domain: Enclosing the Commons of the Mind

“At the moment, everyone gets a copyright as soon as the work is written down or otherwise fixed, whether they want one or not.”
― James Boyle, The Public Domain: Enclosing the Commons of the Mind

“The public domain is not some gummy residue left behind when all the good stuff has been covered by property law. The public domain is the place we quarry the building blocks of our culture. It is, in fact, the majority of our culture.”
― James Boyle, The Public Domain: Enclosing the Commons of the Mind : Annotated Edition

“Information products are often made up of fragments of other information products; your information output is someone else’s information input.”
― James Boyle, The Public Domain: Enclosing the Commons of the Mind

“If we find that the seminal, genre-creating artworks of yesteryear would be illegal under the law and culture of today, we have to ask ourselves “is this really what we want?”
― James Boyle, The Public Domain: Enclosing the Commons of the Mind

“If I light my candle at yours, am I getting fire for free, when otherwise I would have had to pay for matches? Does that make it a ‘commercial’ act?”
― James Boyle, The Public Domain: Enclosing the Commons of the Mind

“Perhaps the romantic author does not create out of thin air. Perhaps he or she is deeply embedded in a literary, musical, cultural, or scientific tradition that would not flourish if treated as a set of permanently walled private plots. . . . the sacred genius of authors might both require a certain level of freedom in knowledge inputs and a certain level of control over knowledge outputs.”
― James Boyle, The Public Domain: Enclosing the Commons of the Mind : Annotated Edition

“The public domain is the basis for our art, our science, and our self-understanding. It is the raw material from which we make new inventions and create new cultural works.”
― James Boyle, The Public Domain: Enclosing the Commons of the Mind

“Our markets, our democracy, our science, our traditions of free speech, and our art all depend more heavily on a public domain of freely available material than they do on the informational material that is covered by property rights.”
― James Boyle, The Public Domain: Enclosing the Commons of the Mind

“In the middle of the most successful and exciting experiment in nonproprietary, distributed creativity in the history of the species, our policy makers can see only the threat from ‘piracy’.”
― James Boyle, The Public Domain: Enclosing the Commons of the Mind

“If we find that the seminal, genre-creating artworks of yesteryear would be illegal under the law and culture of today, we have to ask ourselves ‘is this really what we want?”
― James Boyle, The Public Domain: Enclosing the Commons of the Mind

“iI U.S. law, fair uses are stated quite clearly to be limitations on the exclusive rights of the copyright holder—uses that were never within the copyright holder’s power to prohibit. The defense is not ‘I trespassed on your land, but I was starving.’ It is ‘I did not trespass on your land. I walked on the public road that runs through it, a road you never owned in the first place.’ When society hands out the right to the copyright holder, it carves out certain areas of use and refuses to hand over control of them.”
― James Boyle, The Public Domain: Enclosing the Commons of the Mind

“Call it the openness aversion. Cultural agoraphobia. We are systematically likely to undervalue the importance, viability, and productive power of open systems, open networks, and nonproprietary production.”
― James Boyle, The Public Domain: Enclosing the Commons of the Mind

“In U.S. law, fair uses are stated quite clearly to be limitations on the exclusive rights of the copyright holder—uses that were never within the copyright holder’s power to prohibit. The defense is not ‘I trespassed on your land, but I was starving.’ It is ‘I did not trespass on your land. I walked on the public road that runs through it, a road you never owned in the first place.’ When society hands out the right to the copyright holder, it carves out certain areas of use and refuses to hand over control of them.”
― James Boyle, The Public Domain: Enclosing the Commons of the Mind : Annotated Edition

“In the absence of evidence on either side, the presumption should be against creating a new, legalized monopoly. The burden of proof should lie on those who claim, in any particular case, that the state should step in to stop competition, outlaw copying, proscribe technology, or restrict speech.”
― James Boyle, The Public Domain: Enclosing the Commons of the Mind