Google Books Ngram Viewer is a fantastic tool showing how certain phrases have occurred in a corpus of books over a selected period of time. Recently, fellow bloggers over at orgtheory have played around with this tool (see, for example, “market – science- religion“).
Working on the issue of the digital public domain during my stay at the WZB, I was curious to compare the mentions of “public domain” and “intellectual property”, which are depicted in the graph below:
The resulting graph is pretty interesting. First, I did not know that the term “intellectual property” was virtually non-existant at all prior to 1980. This is remarkable since the negotiations that in the end led to the WTO’s agreement on Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS) had started in the early 1980s. Again, we can observe a shifting baseline effect (see “Shifting Baseline in Assessing Copyright Regulation?“): today the concept of “intellectual property” has become completely taken for granted, while 30 years ago even the phrase hadn’t been used.
Second, the rising interest in intellectual property is accompanied by a rising interest in its counterpart, the public domain. As intellectual property becomes more important so does the public domain.
Third, there is a quite sudden change in the overall trend for both phrases somewhere around 2004. Of course, I can only speculate about the reasons for that. Maybe the special issue in Law & Contemporary Problems on “The Public Domain“, edited by James Boyle and published in 2003, had some impact. Even more so, the increasingly widespread diffusion of Creative Commons licenses launched in 2002 might have contributed to a growing interest into the public domain. This does not, however, explain why mentions of intellectual property have started to decrease at about the same time, given the fact that public domain is regularly defined in demarcation to intellectual property.
(leonhard)
governancexborders.com 
6 comments
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August 9, 2011 at 10:17
Crosbie Fitch
Be careful with ‘public domain’. It has shifted in meaning from the 80’s “known/available to the public” into the previously esoteric meaning “not protected by copyright”.
See The Corruption of Our ‘Public Domain’.
August 9, 2011 at 10:34
leonidobusch
You are right in pointing that out. In a way, the baseline of public domain mentions prior to 1980 are probably more or less unrelated to the issue of copyright/patents/intellectual property.
For the sake of my argument above, however, this does not seem too relevant because I am looking at the recent changes.
August 9, 2011 at 11:36
Crosbie Fitch
Sure.
I’m simply making a separate observation, that people interested in legitimising current meanings will not hesitate to insinuate their ancient provenance and heritage, when in fact they are very recent.
A similar change in meaning has occurred to the word ‘right’, which now means a privilege, power or ‘liberty’ granted by government and recognised by law where a few centuries ago it meant a vital power imbued in man by nature, recognised by law, and secured by a government created and empowered to do so. qv Rights of Man.
In this way, the meanings of our modern language can be used to undermine the interpretation of 18th century English. A modern readiness to describe copyright as an ‘exclusive right’ enables the US Constitution of 1787 (empowering Congress to secure the author’s exclusive right to their writings) to be read as if it empowered the securing of a future privilege (granted in 1790) – it cannot refer to future legislation (despite our familiarity with what is now our well established past). And yet in the very same section it demonstrated the language necessary to empower the granting of privileges such as Letters of Marque. Authors do have an exclusive right to their writings, but it is a right imbued in them by nature, not a reproduction monopoly granted to them by Congress.
Unfortunately, Google is not yet able to discern the meaning of terms it finds. So, it remains fairly easy to rewrite history, not by editing the history books, but by adjusting the meaning of terms and pretending that these new meanings existed longer than just the last few decades.
August 9, 2011 at 11:46
Crosbie Fitch
For an example of the copyright cartel’s Orwellian ‘language repair’ manoeuvres look no further than Artists’ Rights are Human Rights.
August 16, 2011 at 20:46
Crosbie Fitch
As an aside, for pointing out this soon-to-be-extinguished meaning of ‘public domain’ on a recent article by Andy Mabbett he has blocked me from his blog as a spammer, and prompted Andrew Orlowski to underline my status as a spammer in BBC explains ‘All your Twitter pics are belong to us’ gaffe.
However much grief copyright causes people, they cling to it like a narcotic and despise any who suggest it isn’t doing them any good.
May 13, 2012 at 11:01
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