Author granted license

Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International

Document Type

Article

Publication Date

11-20-2025

ISSN

2330-1295

Publisher

JOTWELL

Language

en-US

Abstract

In this essay, Abraham Drassinower updates the argument in his 2015 book What’s Wrong With Copying (Harvard University Press) with an elaboration of the nature of copyright’s public domain: it is a domain of unauthorized yet lawful copying. As in his book, Drassinower explains that the public domain is not properly understood as a problem of balancing between copyright’s public benefits and private rewards. Instead, he understands the public domain as part of authorship and thus inseparable from copyright’s construction.

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