Re: Academics and coursepacks

It seems to me that "public" is in fact the natural state of land, and what is artificial is the property law that can make land private. Liewose, in the IP field, the natural state of creations is that they are publicly available, but the intervention of the law turns them into a form of private property. Before (or in some modern societies - Bali is always cited as the example - in the absence of) copyright, what a person creates is free for all to use.

I don't agree that the analogy is wet (in fact, I find real property examples very helpful in teaching intellectual property law), but I do question whether it starts from the right place.

Peter Groves
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