In this article, I explore the important body of scholarship that has emerged over this time on the substance, nature, and role of the public domain. I offer some concrete definitions of the public domain in the copyright context, identify some ongoing sources of debate in the literature, and highlight some particularly significant voices in public domain discourse. In doing so, my aim is twofold: first, I mean to present a fairly comprehensive, but concise, review of this academic movement that has been directed towards substantiating and politicizing the concept of the public domain; and second, I hope to re-situate it in the Canadian context in which the concept has remained relatively underdeveloped, but where it has a crucial and timely role to play in the evolution of copyright law and policy.

Ultimately, I suggest that the public domain is necessarily protean in nature, and that this is the source of its power. Rather than asking “what is the public domain?”, we should ask ourselves what it is that we need it to be. For my part, I believe that we need a public domain that reflects and protects the dialogic processes of culture in the face of increasingly restrictive intellectual property structures. And so, to the question “where is the public domain?”, we might say that it is both nowhere and everywhere: nowhere because it is best understood merely as metaphor and not as some sort of metaphysical territory or geographically separate preserve; everywhere because it is anywhere where people create and communicate.