Calendar

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Dec
18
Thu
Book Talk: The Public Domain @ Online
Dec 18 @ 10:00 am – 1:00 pm
Book Talk: The Public Domain

Book Talk: The Public Domain

Free

By Internet Archive

Online event

Overview

Join James Boyle with Molly Shaffer Van Houweling on why protecting our cultural commons is essential for creativity and innovation.

Why the public domain is vitally important and what we must do to protect it

In this enlightening book James Boyle describes what he calls the range wars of the information age—today’s heated battles over intellectual property. Boyle argues that just as every informed citizen needs to know at least something about the environment or civil rights, every citizen should also understand intellectual property law. Why? Because intellectual property rights mark out the ground rules of the information society, and today’s policies are unbalanced, unsupported by evidence, and often detrimental to cultural access, free speech, digital creativity, and scientific innovation.

Boyle identifies as a major problem the widespread failure to understand the importance of the public domain—the realm of material that everyone is free to use and share without permission or fee. The public domain is as vital to innovation and culture as the realm of material protected by intellectual property rights, he asserts, and he calls for a movement akin to the environmental movement to preserve it. With a clear analysis of issues ranging from Jefferson’s philosophy of innovation to musical sampling, synthetic biology and Internet file sharing, this timely book brings a positive new perspective to important cultural and legal debates. If we continue to enclose the “commons of the mind,” Boyle argues, we will all be the poorer.

ABOUT OUR SPEAKERS

James Boyle is William Neal Reynolds Professor of Law, Duke University School of Law. He lives in Chapel Hill, NC.

Molly Shaffer Van Houweling joined the Berkeley Law faculty in fall 2005 from the University of Michigan Law School, where she had been an assistant professor since 2002. Van Houweling’s teaching and research interests include intellectual property, law and technology, property, and food law.

78474
Jan
3
Sat
Strike Debt Bay Area Book Group: What’s Left – 3 Paths Through the Planetary Crisis @ Online
Jan 3 @ 5:00 pm – 6:30 pm

Email strike.debt.bay.area@gmail.com a few days beforehand for the online invite.  All are welcome!

For our December, 2025 meeting we will be reading and discussing the first two chapters of What’s Left: Three Paths Through the Planetary Crisis by Malcolm Harris (Amazon) (Hatchette).  For our January meeting we will finish the book.

A vital guide for collective political action against the climate apocalypse, from bestselling progressive intellectual Malcolm Harris—“a brilliant thinker and writer capable of making the intricacies of economic conditions supremely readable” (Vulture).

Climate change is the unifying crisis of our time. But the scale of the problem can be paralyzing, especially when corporations are actively staving off changes that could save the planet but which might threaten their bottom lines. To quote Greta Thunberg, despite very clear science and very real devastation, the adults at the table are still saying “blah blah blah.” Something has to change—but what, and how?

In What’s Left, Malcolm Harris cuts through the noise and gets real about our remaining options for saving the world. Just as humans have caused climate change, we hold the power to avert a climate apocalypse, but that will only happen through collective political action. Harris outlines the three strategies—progressive, socialist, and revolutionary—that have any chance of succeeding, while also revealing that none of them can succeed on their own. What’s Left shows how we must combine them into a single pathway: a meta-strategy, one that will ensure we can move forward together rather than squabbling over potential solutions while the world burns.

Vital and transformative, What’s Left confirms Malcolm Harris as next-generation David Graeber or Mike Davis—a historian-activist who shows us where we stand and how we got here, while also blazing a path toward a brighter future.

Strike Debt Bay Area hosts this non-technical book group discussion monthly on new and radical economic thinking. Our first book was  Doughnut Economics, and our most recent books were The Age of Insecurity and Elinor Ostrom’s Rules for Radicals”. For the rest of our reading list see here.

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