james boyle

Have you prepared your summer reading list yet?

To the academic summers are a mix of joy and dispair. Everyone is envious of our summer holidays while most that I know are all busy clearing time for some larger project. Not many other career choices lead you to voluntarily take a laptop with you on a beach holiday. Each summer the over-optimistic academic plans to make another gargantuan effort to complete their sadly ignored pet-project, spend quality time with family, read proofs, relax, review impossible stack of papers, get a tan and find time to read a pile of books.

I am happy to announce that this year will be no different. Not having learnt anything from previous years the piles of work to be attempted are silly but I am looking forward to the reading list.

At the top of the pile lies Matthew Rimmers work Intellectual Property and Biotechnology, and working down the disorganised list: Mart Laar War in the Woods: Estonia’s struggle for survival 1944-1956, Ulrich Beck Risk Society, Mark Rose Authors and Owners: The Invention of Copyright, James Boyle The Public Domain: Enclosing the Commons of the Mind & Martha Woodmansee (ed) The Construction of Authorship: Textual Appropriation in Law and Literature…

And this is the list in april… Well actually I am looking forward to summer.

Posted on by mklang

Boyle Public Domain podcast

Here is an interesting podcast of James Boyle on his book The Public Domain (via BoingBoing)

Professor James Boyle describes how our culture, science and economic welfare all depend on the delicate balance between those ideas that are controlled and those that are free, between intellectual property and the public domain —the realm of material that everyone is free to use and share without permission or fee

Intellectual property laws have a significant impact on many important areas of human endeavour, including scientific innovation, digital creativity, cultural access and free speech. And so Boyle argues that, just as every informed citizen needs to know at least something about the environment or civil rights, every citizen in the information age should also have an understanding of intellectual property law.

The Public Domain: enclosing the commons of the mind

MP3 Link

Posted on by mklang

Boyle in Cambridge

James Boyle, author of The Public Domain, writes on Boing Boing:

Just a note to say that I am giving a lecture March 10 at 6pm at London’s RSA on my new book, The Public Domain: Enclosing the Commons of the Mind. The lecture hall is gorgeous — Cory has been a frequent speaker there — it has a fabulous series of paintings on the theme of “Progress” by James Barry, featuring earnest waistcoated men with theodolites and many scantily clad young women whose main hope appears to be that The Progress of Human Culture is going to give them something more substantial to wear than a precariously secured bedsheet. The mural is worth the price of admission alone (free but you must register). Following that I’ll be giving the first Arcadia Lecture at Cambridge on Cultural Agoraphobia and the Future of the Library March 12. Hope to see UK BB’ers at one of these events…
The Public Domain: enclosing the commons of the mind (Thanks, Jamie!)

Wish I could be there.

Posted on by mklang