As a result of the digital revolution and the ever-increasing use of the internet, discussions around the conflict between copyright and the public domain are more prevalent than ever before. While these discussions have been hotly debated by legal scholars and in blogs and online forums, Terms of Use is one of the first books to concentrate on the conceptual foundations of the public domain.

Taking an interdisciplinary approach, Eva Hemmungs Wirten reveals the nineteenth-century origins of contemporary phenomena such as blogs, wikis, the Creative Commons, as well as the Open Source and Open Access movements. Hemmungs Wirten examines topics as diverse as the pharmaceutical uses of plants, the patenting of DNA sequences, and Disney’s reworking of Rudyard Kipling’s Jungle Books in order to provide a frank theoretical discussion of how nature and culture have been transformed into intellectual property.

Timely and provocative, Terms of Use will challenge and inspire readers by providing an original and innovative approach to the understanding of the public domain and its origins.