Ready to Share: Fashion and the Ownership of Creativity, edited by David Bollier and Laurie Racine
(Lear Center Press, 2006)
More than any other industry, fashion treats a far larger portion of its creative output as a commons – shared resources that can be freely reused and transformed by other creators. In some ways, the history of fashion is the simultaneously whimsical and serious story of an industry that continues to grow and prosper via Sir Isaac Newton’s maxim, "If I have seen further it is by standing on the shoulders of giants." If innovation, regardless of the sector, is driven by previous innovation, then extrapolation to the fashion industry should apply. It can be postulated that the unrestricted access to previous works – the rip-off, knock-off and outright copying of garments – are exactly what has propelled design through the ages.

Brand Name Bullies: The Quest to Own and Control Culture
(John Wiley & Sons, February 2005)
One of the most serious threats to creativity, free speech and democratic culture is coming from an explosive expansion of copyright law, trademark law and related fields such as "publicity rights" and Internet policies. The scope of this threat is often not seen because it occurs in such isolated ways: McDonald's attacking McVegan, McSushi and other food establishments that dare to use the prefix "Mc" in their name; Mattel threatening lawsuits against unauthorized depictions of Barbie dolls on the Web; the Disney Company demanding that hand-painted images of Mickey and Goofy be removed from day care center walls. The propertization of creativity and culture has reached such extremes that a tennis ball manufacturer has won a trademark on the "smell of freshly cut grass" as used on tennis balls, the Ralph Lauren fashion house has sued to prevent the U.S. Polo Association from using the word "polo," and a prominent yoga instructor has claimed a copyright in a series of yoga postures. Learn how "brand-name bullies" are abusing intellectual property law to lock up culture and destroy the cultural commons.

Sophisticated Sabotage: The Intellectual Games Used to Subvert Responsible Regulation, a new book by Thomas McGarity, Sidney Shapiro and David Bollier, published in September 2004 by the Environmental Law Institute. Drawing upon dozens of law review articles, this book explains in rigorous detail how regulated industries exploit cost-benefit analysis, risk assessment and other contrived quantitative models to avoid health, safety and environmental regulation. An excellent explanation of how economics has overwhelmed law and thwarted government action by using contrived analytic models. Valuable for legislators, public policy analysts, journalists, law scholars and students.

"Artists, Technology and the Ownership of Creative Content"
(Published by the Norman Lear Center, USC Annenberg School for Communication in June 2003)
New digital technologies are greatly complicating the issues facing artists in virtually all fields of creativity. They are radically changing long-honored legal principles, creative practices, market structures and social values; they are challenging the nature of "authorship," the moral rights of creators, the scope of copyright protection, and the very genres of creative work. How shall we make sense of the unprecedented upheaval in the creative world? This book chronicles the rich dialogue of a Lear Center conference on the topic and features four fictional scenarios (on an accompanying CD) that dramatize the dilemmas facing artists. A resource section offers a useful bibliography and other supplementary materials.

Silent Theft: The Private Plunder of Our Common Wealth
Published by Routledge in May 2002, this book describes the dozens of commons in American life that are being rapidly privatized and commercialized. The commons consists of public assets and social management systems. They include public lands and the natural environment, the electromagnetic spectrum, government databases and research, the Internet, academic research and resources, the genetic structures of life, and shared cultural spaces, among many others. The book also outlines various strategies -- political, cultural, and social -- for reclaiming the American commons.

Aiming Higher: 25 Stories of How Companies Prosper by Combining Sound Management and Social Vision. AMACOM, 1996. Profiles of 25 individuals and companies that have creatively combined traditional business objectives with pro-active social concern in such areas as worker empowerment, workforce diversity, AIDS education, environmental protection, mortgage and small business lending, retailing to low-income consumers, and community assistance. Translations made in Chinese, Japanese and Polish.

The Great Hartford Circus Fire: Creative Settlement of Mass Disasters, with co-author Henry Cohn. Yale University Press, 1992. Chronicles the tragic 1944 fire at the Ringling Bros.-Barnum & Bailey circus in Hartford; its creative legal aftermath resulting in an unprecedented settlement of hundreds of cases; and the lessons for curbing the expensive, lengthy litigation that attends most contemporary mass torts.




Crusaders & Criminals, Victims & Visionaries: Historic Encounters Between Connecticut Citizens and the United States Supreme Court.
Connecticut Attorney General, 1986. A popularized constitutional history of 31 major Connecticut cases that went to the U.S. Supreme Court over the past 200 years. Book is widely used in Connecticut high schools.




Freedom from Harm: The Civilizing Influence of Health, Safety and Environmental Regulation, with co-author Joan Claybrook. Public Citizen and the Democracy Project, 1986. Surveys the accomplishments of six key federal regulatory agencies and examines the preventive health strategies they have pioneered.

Liberty & Justice for Some: Defending a Free Society from the Radical Right's Holy War on Democracy. Frederick Ungar Publishing and People for the American Way, 1982. A primer on the religio-political concerns of the New Right and Religious Right.