CENTER FOR THE STUDY OF THE PUBLIC DOMAIN

The public domain is the realm of material—ideas, images, sounds, discoveries, facts, texts—that is unprotected by intellectual property rights and free for all to use or build upon.  Our economy, culture and technology depend on a delicate balance between that which is, and is not, protected by exclusive intellectual property rights. Both the incentives provided by intellectual property and the freedom provided by the public domain are crucial to the balance. But most contemporary attention has gone to the realm of the protected.

The Center for the Study of the Public Domain at Duke Law School is the first university center in the world devoted to the other side of the picture.  Founded in September of 2002, as part of the school’s wider intellectual property program, its mission is to promote research and scholarship on the contributions of the public domain to speech, culture, science and innovation, to promote debate about the balance needed in our intellectual property system and to translate academic research into public policy solutions.  The Center was created by James Boyle, David Lange and Jerome Reichman, who act as its Faculty Co-Directors.  Its Director is Jennifer Jenkins.  The Center is supported in its operation by a generous founding gift and by grants from Foundations.  On this site, you can read more about the Center, and its projects and events.

 

In 2003-2004, the Center is holding an interdisciplinary lecture series on "The Information Ecology," which features presentations on intellectual property and related areas - such as innovation economics, Internet and communications policy, cyberlaw, genomics, and a variety of other subjects. Lecture webcasts, papers and powerpoint presentations. A special edition collection of the papers from the Duke Conference on the Public Domain is now available for purchase on amazon.com. The topics of these essays cover a broad range of public domain study, from the history and theory of the public domain, to the constitutionalization of the public domain, to analyses of the public domain in culture, science and the digital realm. The authors include prominent environmental scholars, appropriation artists, legal theorists, historians and literary critics. Free digital versions of these papers are available here.