“If I have seen further, it is by standing on the shoulders of giants.”
—Sir Isaac Newton
“If I have not seen as far as others, it is because there were giants standing on my shoulders.”
—Hal Abelson
This information isn’t meant to promote “stealing” ideas, nor does it attack the rights of authors and creators, inventors and innovators. It is simply meant to get us all thinking about our shared cultural heritage and about how many things—great works of art and literature, contemporary movies and dime-store novels, and even innovations in science and software—are the result of a kind of information “infection.”
Intellectual innovation—ideas in whatever form—are the result of a chain reaction that may happen immediately or last for centuries. People live in communities, not in isolation. So do ideas. Communities of information have to be passed down from one generation to the next and spread from one society to another.
A Wellspring of Creativity
The public domain is, in a very real sense, the catalyst and wellspring for creativity and innovation. Where would Disney be without the Brothers Grimm, Victor Hugo, Hans Christian Anderson, Kipling, or classical mythology? Where would Aaron Copland have been without American folk songs? Picasso without African art? Even Duchamp without his urinal? Public domain appropriators, one and all.
It is part of our role in life to make songs and stories our own, to transform pop culture into what the sociologist Gary Fine calls idioculture, the idiosyncratic adaptation of mass culture that occurs in families and communities. An authentic cultural democracy, Don Adams and Arlene Goldbard have noted, “requires active participation in cultural life, not just passive consumption of cultural products.”
The Economic Value of the Public Domain
There is another type of value associated with the public domain—an economic value. Simply stated, works in the public domain cost less. The reason you can purchase The Iliad for a song is because no one owns it. No royalty costs need to be figured into the replication costs. Just as copyright offers an incentive to creators, so too the public domain, with its low costs, offer creators an economic incentive of a sort. It offers cheap content—to be used, reformulated, and recast. West Side Story emerges from Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet; Amadeus emerges from the music of Mozart and Salieri.
Preserving a Healthy Public Domain
So, what else is the public domain for than for adapting ancient stories and telling them in updated and different situations? The public domain is part of a healthy information environment, an ecosystem of information. To remain healthy and robust, a balance must exist between licenses, copyrights, patents, and freely available information. Primarily due to new legislation responding to new technologies, the information commons has fallen out of balance. Nothing new will really enter the public domain for the next 20 years. This will have a major impact of people’s need to communicate, to share ideas, to pass down traditional knowledge, to participate in popular culture. Whether a writer or scientist, issues surrounding Intellectual Property and the Public Domain affect us all. Journalists who are being forced to sign over the rights to their writings for the next 95 years to their employers will be allied with the genetic researchers who can’t study breast cancer genes because of patents.
Contributing to the Public Domain
Recognizing the intrinsic value of this information commons and the public domain is the point of this webpage. So, say you’ve been convinced? Now what?
Consider donating works to the public domain or to consortiums like the Creative Commons.
Think about what things are too valuable to be owned. Consider that copyright protection can sometimes encourage new artists and creators to keep traditional works alive. Think about the compromises that we can make so that creators and consumers both get a fair shake financially and in terms of access.
