Comics

Theft! A History of Music
The book is a graphic novel (aka “comic book”)  laying out a 2000 year history of musical borrowing from Plato to rap. The comic, by James Boyle, Jennifer Jenkins and the late Keith Aoki is available as a handsome 8.5 x 11″ paperback, and for free download under a Creative Commons license.

Tales from the Public Domain: Bound By Law? Expanded edition
Duke University Press offers an expanded edition of the Center’s comic book on copyright and fair use, with a new foreword by Oscar-winning filmmaker Davis Guggenheim and new introduction by award-winning novelist Cory Doctorow. [ buy the expanded edition ]

Tales from the Public Domain: Bound By Law? Original edition
A documentary is being filmed. A cell phone rings, playing the “Rocky” theme song. The filmmaker is told she must pay $10,000 to clear the rights to the song. Can this be true? What’s going on here? It’s the collision of documentary filmmaking and intellectual property law, and it’s the inspiration for this comic book. Follow its heroine Akiko as she films her documentary, and navigates the twists and turns of intellectual property. Why do we have copyrights? What’s “fair use”? Bound By Law reaches beyond documentary film to provide a commentary on the most pressing issues facing law, art, property and an increasingly digital world of remixed culture. [visit the comic site to read online or download | buy the original edition ]

Bound By Law? has also been translated. You can read the Français/French | Italiano/Italian | Polszczyzna/Polish | Portuguesa/Portuguese (Continental) | Português do Brasil/Portuguese (Brasilian) versions online.

Books

Music Copyright, Creativity & Culture, (2nd edition, 2026)
Jennifer Jenkins
This is the open access, full color, 2nd edition of Music Copyright, Creativity and Culture, an introduction to the fascinating story of the legal, economic, aesthetic and technological forces that shape the music we love. It can be read by anyone who interested in that story and is also used as a textbook in classes ranging from undergraduate to law school. It is freely available to noncommercially share, copy and even modify under a Creative Commons license and has no connection to Oxford University Press, which published the first edition. [ buy the book | download a copy | find out more ]

Intellectual Property: Law & the Information Society – Cases and Materials (6th Edition 2024)
James Boyle & Jennifer Jenkins
The Center’s Open Coursebook offers an overview of U.S. intellectual property law—trademark, copyright and patent; and this revised edition updates an entirely new chapter on trade secrecy and preemption. It is designed for an introductory course in intellectual property law, but the casebook can be adapted for use in a wide variety of courses. The book is free to download or a printed copy can be purchased at cost. The materials are available under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 U.S. license: you can share and adapt them as you might need. (Note that the CC license does not apply to the underlying cases which are in the public domain; nor does it apply where your use is permitted by an applicable exception or limitation.) [ buy the book | download a copy | find out more ]

Intellectual Property: Law & the Information Society—Selected Statutes & Treaties (2016 edition)
James Boyle & Jennifer Jenkins
This statutory supplement is the companion to the Center’s Intellectual Property: Law & the Information Society—Cases and Materials, Fourth Edition, and offers the full text of the Federal trademark, copyright and patent statutes (including edits detailing the changes made by the America Invents Act), and adds material on economic espionage, trade secrecy and internet domain dispute resolution procedures. It includes a number of important international treaties and a chart comparing the various types of federal intellectual property rights — their constitutional bases, subject matter, length, exceptions, and so on. The book is free to download or a printed copy can be purchased at cost. The materials are available under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 U.S. license: you can share and adapt them as you might need. (Note that the CC license does not apply to the underlying statutes and treaties which are in the public domain; nor does it apply where your use is permitted by an applicable exception or limitation.) [ buy the book | download a PDF version ]

The Public Domain: Enclosing the Commons of the Mind
James Boyle
All culture, science, and even commerce depend on the balance between intellectual property rights and the public domain – those ideas outside IP’s grip. In this book, Professor James Boyle introduces readers to the idea of the public domain and describes its erosion through the current application of copyright, patent, and trademark laws. Using a series of case studies, Boyle shows how gene sequences, basic business ideas, and pairs of musical notes are now owned, why jazz might be illegal if it were invented today, why most of 20th century culture is legally unavailable to us, and why today’s policies would probably have smothered the World Wide Web at its inception. [ buy the book | read the book online or download a copy | find out more ]

International Public Goods and Transfers of Technology under a Global Intellectual Property Regime
Keith E. Maskus & Jerome H. Reichman, eds.
Distinguished economists, political scientists, and legal experts discuss the implications of the increasingly globalized protection of intellectual property rights for the ability of countries to provide their citizens with such important public goods as basic research, education, public health, and environmental protection. Such items increasingly depend on the exercise of private rights over technical inputs and information goods, which could usher in a brave new world of accelerating technological innovation. [ more information or to buy the book ]

Cultural Environmentalism @ 10
Collected articles explore the development and expansion of Professor James Boyle’s “cultural environmentalism” metaphor over the past ten years. The papers are a result of a conference at Stanford University, organized by Professor Lawrence Lessig, to mark the tenth anniversary of publication of Professor Boyle’s article, “Sold Out,” in The New York Times. [ more about the conference | read the collection online | read the original The New York Times article online ]

Collected Papers, Duke Conference on the Public Domain
James Boyle, special editor
The symposium is an edited version of the papers from a unique conference on the public domain at Duke University. Writing in the Financial Times, Patti Waldmeir described the event this way: “Professor Boyle brought together an elite group of intellectuals and scientists (and computer geeks) at Duke, hoping to launch a movement to protect the public domain. He argues that the inexorable advance of intellectual property law in recent years constitutes a ‘second enclosure movement’ to parallel the 18th-century enclosure of English common lands.” In Technology Review magazine, Seth Shulman called the conference “an extraordinary meeting” and added: “In attendance were an eclectic array of actors from distinct intellectual-property battles…It was fascinating to see the sparks of commonality among this diverse group. Warning that greed and shortsightedness threaten to despoil innovation the way a previous frontier-minded generation despoiled the natural environment, a series of speakers urged the group to consider itself as an environmental movement for the new millennium – guarding collectively against the encroachment of proprietary intellectual-property rights.” [ more on the conference | read the articles from the symposium online | buy a special edition of the papers ]

Policy Papers

A Manifesto on WIPO and the Future of Intellectual Property
Article discusses the role of the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) in shaping policy and offers seven Guiding Principles for rational and humane intellectual property policy. [ read the article online ]

Orphan Works: Analysis and Proposal
The costs of an inadequate system of access to orphan works are huge: needlessly disintegrating films, prohibitive costs for libraries, incomplete and spotted histories, thwarted scholarship, digital libraries put on hold, delays to publication. In the cases where the work is truly an orphan work, those costs are tragic because they are completely unnecessary. This report describes the orphan works problem, and offers a proposal to fix it. [ download a PDF of the paper ]

Access to Orphan Films
The difficulty of access to orphan films is a matter of crisis because these works are literally disintegrating. At a time when digital technologies allow for more sophisticated and cheaper restoration and distribution of old films, uncertainty about copyright status has impeded restoration efforts. Worse still, in most cases the films are completely unavailable to the public even for simple viewing. This report describes these problems in detail. [ download a PDF of the paper ]