ABSTRACT
Ascriptions of 'user's rights' can be found at work in every corner of intellectual property discourse. In everyday legal discussion it is common to hear references to user's rights to quote, for example, and for these to be distinguished from the copying privileges of librarians. Kames in Scotland, and Condorcet in France spoke the language of rights against demands for stronger literary property. More recently, user's rights have become a recurring motif in the burgeoning public domain literature. The public domain does not shape the user's right. Rather, the public domain is determined by the conceptually prior user's right. John Cahir mounts a multi-faceted argument against public domain theorists cavalier use of the 'R'-word. Edward Samuels criticized the lack of systematic theory behind public domain commentary, he doubted the capacity of any one moral concern to explain the public domain's makeup, and he worried rights-language would impel all-or-nothing answers to complex questions.
