Law Matters

The garden, closed off though it generally is, reflects the world to which it belongs. This piece, written from a place of disenchantment, considers the structure of gardens, and attempts to explore, through law and literature, the manner in which the law has a tendency to prioritise the protection of that which is attributable to the socially privileged. v1.2 9 MARCH 2025 The garden is often an escape into a liminal world between the quotidian and the fantastic, the ornamental and the productive. It is a world in which it is difficult not to find beauty but in which beauty, even when it is naught but artifice, is not necessarily considered to be art in any sense that copyright law would recognise despite the fact that, to be a garden, the space in which it exists must have been influenced by human skill, creativity, and vision.  The Remains of the Past The gardens of our imaginations stretch the spectrum from luxuriant, barely contained wildness to nature severely constrained. Whi...

v1.1 13 FEBRUARY 2025 An exploration of how the commons have been shaped, diminished and developed, over time… bearing in mind that the contours of the commons will determine the legitimacy of the unauthorised use of content as training data for AI The Earth was given to the world of men in common, John Locke asserted in his 1689 Second Treatise on government, echoing Psalms 115:16. He noted that ‘no body has originally a private Dominion, exclusive of the rest of Mankind’ but also recognised that the development of a mechanism to appropriate the gifts of God, the world and that which lay in it, was necessary ‘before they can be of any use, or at all beneficial to any particular Man’. Writing several hundred years after the commons and the proprietary began to confront each other, Locke's world was fast moving towards one in which the proprietary was the norm, and not the commons. The proprietary was not the anti-commons; it was the commons which had become the anti- proprietary. ...