Bibliographic record
Abstract
The concept of the "public domain" is a powerful rhetorical element in he policy debates involving intellectual property. But is it a stable and useful concept for analyzing information issues? Can the notion of the public domain and the concept of the information commons be separated? Is the notion of the public domain merely another way of expressing the public interest? This paper canvassed the literature, seeking a theoretically consistent definition for public domain that was equally applicable across the copyright, trademark and patent spheres. The analysis demonstrated that there is no such construct. The paper also reviews the findings of those who have tried to empirically demonstrate the ambit of the public domain and illustrates that the problems of definition identified as part of the canvas of theoretical approaches also plague attempts to create a consistent empirical picture. However, these attempts themselves demonstrate, despite the long international commitment to intellectual property, how nationally jurisdictionally bound each description of the public domain is. Finally, although the public domain concept may be recognized as having value as an explanatory device, given its limited theoretical and descriptive value, one may question its role as rhetoric affecting policy development. Given the etymological roots of the concept of the public domain, in an agrarian-rooted property context, and given the multidimensional complexities of the current information society, the paper concludes that the notion of the public domain can lead to an oversimplification of the environment within which intellectual property devices operate.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.005 | 0.007 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.006 | 0.028 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.011 | 0.012 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.005 |
| Research integrity | 0.004 | 0.005 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.009 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".