James Boyle’s new book, The Public Domain: Enclosing the Commons of the Mind, is out from Yale University Press and for free download. His site for the book (see link on book name) is chocked full of video and other great supporting materials.
Jamie introduced me to many of the Creative Commons concepts via his earlier groundbreaking book, Shamans, Software and Spleens: Law and the Construction of the Information Society. After reading that book in 1996, I managed to get Jamie, Mark Hosler (of Negativland) and the late Anne Branscomb (author of Who Owns Information) up to Charlottesville, Va to speak to the Wahoos. Jamie was such a hit (all three were each in their own way) that the Federalist Society invited him to be one of their speakers. This lead to one of my favorite Boyle moments. In his self-introduction, he said “If we transposed political positions onto the map of the United States, the Federalist Society would be in Maine and I would be somewhere to the west of Honolulu, so you should be skeptical of the arguments I put forward.”
Boyle delivered a great talk at Duke last week which you can watch here: “A Song’s Tale: Mashups, Borrowing and the Law” (requires RealPlayer or on YouTube below). This talk links copyright to gospel music, Ray Charles, Kanye West, Hurricane Katrina and Jesus to a good woman and a gold-digger (for starters).
Well we got with the 21st century and we put the webcast of Jamie Boyle’s talk on YouTube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W_eULq_aP60
Thanks Sean. Added the YouTube embed above.