| Summary: | Part of a special issue on the public domain. New state-created laws are covering things that were once thought of as either common property or uncommodifiable with new, or newly extended, property rights. Intellectual property is now in and on computer desktops and it is implicated in routine creative, communicative, and consumptive acts that are performed every day. Although there are similarities between the first enclosure movement in England and the expansion of intellectual property, two key differences remain between the two: the commons of the mind is generally “nonrival”; and enclosure of the information commons has the potential to harm innovation as well as to support it.
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