ABSTRACT
AOKI’s two-part article explores the controversial view that the advent of intellectual property rights has brought about the withdrawal of increasing amounts of material from the public domain. Drawing on the earlier work of writers such as Boyle and Jaszi, he analyses the concepts of authorship, originality, creativity, and invention as evidenced in US copyright, patent, and trademark law. Aoki argues that the pervasive notion of “author” has been employed to confer private proprietary rights, which exclude other valuable forms of cultural production, curb the free flow of socially beneficial information, and are at odds with the stated goals of the intellectual property system.
