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Grosheide, F. Willem --- "In Search of the Public Domain during the Prehistory of Copyright Law" [2007] ELECD 149; in Waelde, Charlotte; MacQueen, Hector (eds), "Intellectual Property" (Edward Elgar Publishing, 2007)

Book Title: Intellectual Property

Editor(s): Waelde, Charlotte; MacQueen, Hector

Publisher: Edward Elgar Publishing

ISBN (hard cover): 9781845428747

Section: Chapter 1

Section Title: In Search of the Public Domain during the Prehistory of Copyright Law

Author(s): Grosheide, F. Willem

Number of pages: 20

Extract:

1. In search of the public domain during
the prehistory of copyright law
F. Willem Grosheide

Everyone has thoughts. Some may turn them into ideas.
Even fewer will be able to give them form and colour.
And who is doing this, constantly will hear:
Just what I thought. Yes, indeed, except context, colour,
shadows, i.e. except very much. (Multatuli, 1862)1



1 PRELIMINARY OBSERVATIONS
Between the years 1862 and 1877 the Dutch author Multatuli compiled seven
bundles of what he called ideeën (ideas), in which he gave his anachronistically
radical views on a wide range of societal and paradigmatic issues, running from
education to feminism, or from religion to roulette. In the idea which has been
placed as the motto above this account of early views on the public domain
during the prehistory of copyright law, Multatuli, referring to the common and
the individual parts in human communication, hints at some form of crediting,
social or legal, to the originator of the expressed idea.2 When he wrote, the
Netherlands, like other Western European countries, already recognised a ru-


1
Multatuli, the pseudonym of Eduard Douwes Dekker (1820­87), is one of the
greatest Dutch authors whose radical opinions and freshness of style managed to escape
from the middle of the road, self-satisfied, bourgeois Dutch literature of the mid-19th
century.
2
As is well known, Multatuli was not the only European writer, or rather intel-
lectual, who at the time was striving for social and legal ...