Books

Rosemary Coombe, The Cultural Life of Intellectual Properties, Duke, 1998.

Jack Kloppenburg, First the Seed The Political Economy of Plant Biotechnology, 1492-2000, Second Edition, Univ. of Wisconsin Press, 2004. This book recounts the political economy of agriculture with astonishing clarity and depth. Kloppenburg provides a paradigmatic example of the impacts of the privatization on a relatively communal form of life, farming.

David Marquand, Decline of the Public, Polity Press, 2004: "David Marquand traces the growth of the public domain from Gladstone to Attlee, analyzes the forces that began to undermine it in its post-war heyday and exposes the campaign that the Thatcher and Blair governments have waged against it." (From the book jacket). With a simple change in the names of persons and particular events described in this lucidly written brief book, the same analysis can be applied to Canada with illuminating results. (BK)

James Boyle and other eminent scholars, The Public Domain, Law and Contemporary Problems, Volume 66, Winter/Spring 2003, Numbers 1 & 2. This collection of papers is the place to start. The Forum on Privatization and the Public Domain is indebted to James Boyle and this collection for arguing the case for creating a public discourse on the public domain. Boyle brought together the best scholars on the subject at a symposium that produced the 13 papers in this volume, all available under a Creative Commons license at Boyle's website: http://www.law.duke.edu/boylesite/. See also: James Boyle, Shamans, Software and Spleens, Harvard, 1996.