The Public Domain

James Boyle's The Public Domain: Enclosing the Commons of the Mind is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike License. It available for download from Yale University Press here.

"Musical styles change over time and so do their techniques of appropriation. Sometimes musical generations find their successors are engaging in different types of borrowing than they themselves engaged in. They do not always find it congenial. It is striking how often musicians condemn a younger generation’s practice of musical appropriation as theft, while viewing their own musical development and indebtedness as benign and organic. … [Sampling] is a different kind of borrowing than the adaptation of a chord pattern from a gospel standard to make an R&B hit. But which way does the difference cut as a matter of ethics, aesthetics, or law?"

This is good material for people working on copyright and appropriation for their final papers. Chapter 6 ("I Got A Mashup") is especially pertinent. Read it together with Matt Mason's "We Invented the Remix" chapter from The Pirate's Dilemma posted a few weeks back. Chapter 6 is here, from the 'annotatable' version on the website of Boyle's book.