Macmillan, Fiona --- "Public Interest and the Public Domain in an Era of Corporate Dominance" [2006] ELECD 366; in Andersen, Birgitte (ed), "Intellectual Property Rights" (Edward Elgar Publishing, 2006)

Book Title: Intellectual Property Rights

Editor(s): Andersen, Birgitte

Publisher: Edward Elgar Publishing

ISBN (hard cover): 9781845422691

Section: Chapter 2

Section Title: Public Interest and the Public Domain in an Era of Corporate Dominance

Author(s): Macmillan, Fiona

Number of pages: 24

Extract:

2. Public interest and the public
domain in an era of corporate
dominance
Fiona Macmillan

ABSTRACT

This chapter argues that copyright's commodification of creativity has
established a structure that enables the domination of cultural output by
multinational media and entertainment corporations. It argues that the
primary tools of the commodification process have been the alienability of
the copyright interest, the long duration of copyright, its strong distribution
rights, and the apparent demise of some of the most significant user rights.
The consequent dominance of the media and entertainment corporations
over cultural output has had the effect of contracting the public domain, while
at the same time undermining the rationale for the existence of copyright.
The chapter concludes by considering whether there are legal approaches
either within the structure of copyright law or external to it that might be
capable of remedying the consequences of copyright's commodification of
creativity and thus reclaiming a portion of the public domain.

Keywords: Public interest, Public domain, Corporate dominance,
Copyright and culture


1 COPYRIGHT'S COMMODIFICATION OF
CREATIVITY

I have argued in other places (Macmillan 1998, Macmillan 2002a, Macmillan
2002b) that copyright's relationship to the concepts of creativity and culture,
with which it is often rhetorically associated (Waldron 1993, p. 853), is most
accurately viewed as an instrumental rather than a fundamental one.1 That
is, copyright has been well used as an instrument for promoting trade in

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