Public domain

This entry defines the public domain, or the commons, as the absence of intellectual property (IP), a place where intellectual creations lose their identity as law-backed exclusive ownership and become freely available resources. The entry goes on to survey theories and characterizations of the public domain in academic and popular culture, and highlights proposals for change to copyright laws and the commons made by authors as different as Victor Hugo, Mark Twain, and Ezra Pound. After examining creative treatments of the public domain in the written opinions of noted judges, the entry concludes by showing how certain modern authors—Oscar Wilde, James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, and Spider Robinson—have used their fictions to explore the tension between property and freedom in ideas.