As a result of the digital revolution and the ever-increasing use of the internet, discussions around the conflict between copyright and the public domain are more prevalent than ever before. While these discussions have been hotly debated by legal scholars and in blogs and online forums, Terms of Use is one of the first books to concentrate on the conceptual foundations of the public domain.

Taking an interdisciplinary approach, Eva Hemmungs Wirt?n reveals the nineteenth-century origins of contemporary phenomena such as blogs, wikis, the "Creative Commons," as well as the...