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Draw Me A Public Domain, Severine Dusollier, Valérie-Laure Benabou

Severine Dusollier

Copyright is forged from pieces of land taken from the public domain. Absence of any restrictions on the products of the mind and of creation is the rule while intellectual property is the exception. Yet intellectual property has constantly expanded over the realm of the public domain. The on-going commodification of the latter has been regularly denounced in scholarship. This article aims at sketching a regime for the public domain that would contain some rules through which it could resist encroachment by private property. It starts from the analysis that the current perception and regime of the public domain in …