Common as Air by Lewis Hyde

Hyde feels that the boundaries of intellectual property have been stretched beyond the boundaires of reasonableness. In his new book, "Common as Air," he delineates the history of intellectual property ownership, the changes in technology and social conditions that have influenced the law over the centuries, and the state of the law today. His conclusion, and it's inescapable, is that copyright and patent protections have gotten out of control. Worse, they threaten today to stifle creativity across the artistic spectrum and hamper the advance of scientific discovery. They give heirs of artists and public figures excessive power to control public discourse, and that this is contrary to the intent of the founding fathers. he does a wonderful and engaging job of tracing patents of Revolutionary era heavy hitters, like Ben Franklin and Thomas Jefferson, and discussing why they elected to patent some of their ideas and chose not to patent others.

Hyde argues that it's time to strike a new balance between the incentives and compensation that will encourage creative minds to keep writing, drawing, composing and inventing, and the need to place their work in the public domain after a decent interval. More precisely, he suggests that we reexamine the principles of earlier times to find formulas that work today. He accepts that technology may have rendered some copyright principles obsolete. Consider the "first sale doctrine," which governed the rights of buyers of books, records, videotapes and other such physical embodiments of intellectual content. It was long acknowledged that once you bought a book you could lend it, give it away, read it to your child, paste pages of it in your diary or resell it — you couldn't print more copies, but that was about the only limitation. Hyde argues that we start to value the common good more and to back off on the intellectual property protections. He does not tough the subject of genetically modified food and the future of feeding the planet, which would have fit nicely into this discussion. Highly recommended reading that is short, concise and readable.