The Public Domain: Enclosing the Commons of the Mind is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike License.
If you like it, please consider buying a copy.
Why am I allowing you to copy the book for free? And why is Yale University Press letting me? To understand why I am doing it, watch this video by Jesse Dylan. And if you want to understand why it makes economic sense to my publisher, read this short article.
Download the book as a pdf. (1.6Mb)
This is the book exactly as it is printed — same typesetting and pagination. The pdf is searchable and has bookmarks for each chapter. If clicking on the link doesn’t open the book in your browser — which takes a few seconds, depending on the speed of your connection – right click the link and choose “Save As” (on a PC) or Control-click (on a Mac) and choose “Save Link As”. Then double click the file you have downloaded. If you are the impatient type, here is a link to a faster loading and slightly smaller version which you should be able to start reading even as it downloads. The downside is, some people have experienced problems with it; (older versions of Acrobat, some versions of Mozilla Firefox, some Linux pdf viewers..)
Download/read in html
Read Online at Yale University Press (html)
Preface: Comprised of at Least Jelly?
Chapter 1: Why Intellectual Property?
Chapter 2: Thomas Jefferson Writes a Letter
Chapter 3: The Second Enclosure Movement
Chapter 4: The Internet Threat
Chapter 5: The Farmers’ Tale: An Allegory
Chapter 7: The Enclosure of Science and Technology: Two Case Studies
Chapter 9: An Evidence-Free Zone
Chapter 10: An Environmentalism for Information
Further Reading: An Annotated Bibliography with further reading on each chapter of the book.
Courtesy of Greg Kearney of Curtin University Centre for Accessible Technology here is a DAISY talking book version (Information on DAISY books here)
Here is another html version created by Franco Iacomella. Thanks!
And a Palm PDB e-book version of “The Public Domain”, complete with formatting and footnotes created by Wizard Prang. Thanks!
(The only versions that I have tested for accuracy are the pdf and html versions I supplied.)
