...nd the boundaries of one institution. A large group of intellectual property scholars have influenced my ideas. Most impor- tantly, Larry Lessig and Yo... ...e each given far more than they received from me in the “sharing economy” of scholarship. If the ideas I de- scribe here have a future, it is because ... ...he Digital Millennium Copyright Act gives content providers a whole array of legally protected digital fences to en- close their work. 6 In some cases... ...s? Even the ones they claim to have been dictated by gods or aliens? Even if American copyright law requires “an author,” presumably a human one? 9 Ca... ...uce you to intellectual property, to ex- plain why it matters, why it is the legal form of the information age. The second goal is to persuade you tha... ... very moment in history when we need them most. Academic articles and clever legal briefs cannot solve this problem alone. Instead, I argue that preci... ...rite about complicated issues, some of which have been neglected by academic scholarship, while others have been catalogued in detail. I want to advan... ...r the films of the Second World War, or footage on the daily lives of African-Americans during segregation, or the music of the Great Depression, or th... ...hey were successful. 36 As Yochai Benkler puts it, Alice Randall, an African American woman, was ordered by a government official not to publish her cr...

...sic 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. Appropriately given its theme, the book will be sold commercially but also made available online for free ...