James Boyle has a written an important book, The Public Domain: Enclosing the Commons of the Mind, which you can also download for free from his site. He has the following intriguing proposition:

In the tradition of the environmental movement, which first invented and then sought to protect something called “the environment,” Boyle hopes that we can first understand and then protect the public domain – the ecological center of the “information environment.”

I’m in the process of trying to link network media practices with the environment. In other words, is there an ecological architecture behind new media practices that can be made more evident in order to encourage new business practices? Part of which means open systems and sharing. As the following snip from his Website attests, Boyle believes you can give something away and sell it simultaneously. True enough. I often prefer a book as opposed to a PDF, so usually after reviewing a PDF of a book, and I like it, I’ll buy it. Also, as a college professor (wow, it sounds weird saying that), I find copyright restrictions an unbearably difficult barrier for exposing students to a lot of material that, if forced to make them buy, I usually won’t, especially considering the onerous pricing of textbooks.

You might wonder why I didn’t go this route with my own book. It was my sincere desire to publish with a the Creative Commons license, but the publisher didn’t understand the concept (it was hard enough to get the copyright in my name as opposed to the publisher). In the future, I hope to publish using Creative Commons. Boyle argues the benefits below.

Questions from Authors.. | The Public Domain |:

[For] an academic who wants to write a book that isn’t directly aimed at the mass market, (The Particle Physics Diet, How to Use the Secrets of Behavioral Economics to Improve your Golf Game, Secret Dating Strategies of Accountants etc.) but which has substantial potential reach in lots of different types of audience — academic and lay — the CC license might well be the best strategy in terms of sales. There the key thing is reaching your potential readers when you don’t know exactly who or where they are. And free (potentially viral) distribution does that extremely well. Yochai Benkler’s The Wealth of Networks is a nice example of this phenomenon. It turns out that many more people than one would imagine are fascinated by the economic characteristics of networks, peer production and so on.