Intellectual Property Law

NY Times Reviews "Common As Air": History of IP

By Marty Schwimmer

NY Times: "A Republic of Letters: Review of "Common As Air":

Intellectual property has become such a hot topic that it needs to be doused with some history. Strange as it may sound, this is an argument developed convincingly in Lewis Hyde?s ?Common as Air,? an eloquent and erudite plea for protecting our cultural patrimony from appropriation by commercial interests.

The history that Hyde invokes goes back to the Middle Ages, when vil­lagers enjoyed collective rights to common lands, but for the most part it is situated in the era of the founding fathers. Hyde invokes the founders in order to warn us against a new enclosure movement, one that would fence off large sectors of the public domain ? in science, the arts, literature, and the entire world of knowledge ? in order to exploit monopolies.

He cites plenty of examples from Hollywood, the pharmaceutical industry, agribusiness, and the swarm of lobbyists who transform public knowledge into private preserves by manipulating laws for the protection of intellectual property. Then he draws on Franklin, Adams, Jefferson and Madison for arguments against such privatization.

Full post as published by Trademark Blog on August 21, 2010 (boomark / email).