An IP Environmentalism for Culture and Knowledge?

An anonymous reader writes "An article by James Boyle in the FT argues that we are (slowly) moving towards a 'cultural environmentalism' that tries to protect the public domain in the way that the environmental movement tries to protect the natural ecology. Apparently there will be a (free) conference at Stanford on the subject soon, organized by Larry Lessig's Center there."

Environmentalism For the Net?

[P0ldy]

A more elaborate explanation of this idea is in his essay "A Politics of Intellectual Property: Environmentalism For the Net? [duke.edu]" from 1997.

See section V.

Buzzwords from bad analogy

[G4from128k]

I'm sure they tried very very hard to create a feel-good phrase but "cultural environmentalism" doesn't work. Ecological environmentalism seeks to prevent any human-made effects in ecological systems -- preventing any human-made changes to pristine ecologies and removing the effects of humans from sullied ecologies. The true parallel that could be considered "cultural environmentalism" might include splitting or censoring the internet to prevent the flow of "deleterious" culture from one country to another (just like the USDA tries to regulate the import for foriegn plants and animals). Some of the issues raised by Islamic fundamentalism might be true examples of cultural environmentalism in that they seek to avoid pollution from western cultures. The point is that China and Bin Laden are doing more for true "cultural environmentalism" than are Lessig and crew.

This version of "cultural environmentalism" is less about prevention of change or pollution of cultures by "bad" cultural influences and more of an economic fight about who pays and who does for so-called "cultural" properties. Lessig et al have only made use of a positive buzzword.

Its just another example of co-opting a word for its connotations, not its true meaning (like calling every act of violence or non-patriotic idea a "terrorist" threat).

Undeleting the agent

[tepples]

"People should care about the public domain."

You miss. The unstated agent of the sentence "The public domain should be cared about" may have not been "people".

Those who disapprove of preposition stranding [wikipedia.org] in English tend to cite the rewrite rule that transforms the dependent clause (THAT clause preposition) into (preposition WHICH clause) or the question (wh-word vso-inverted-clause preposition) into (preposition wh-word vso-inverted-clause). Rewrite rules such as these do not work so easily in all cases. Specifically, rewriting sentences of the form (patient passivized-intransitive preposition) requires depassivizing the sentence to (agent intransitive preposition patient), and undeleting the agent can almost never happen automatically, as it requires encyclopedic knowledge of the subject matter. In fact, some words traditionally advertised as prepositions function more like adverbs. Nowadays, many grammarians consider this rule obsolete [homestead.com], and it should not be unquestioningly adhered to.

ObTopic: The public domain should still be cared about, even those works whose authors habitually end sentences with prepositions.

Re:Conflicting Inalienable Rights

[EzInKy]

On the one hand, you have copyrights: the notional right of the copyright holder to prevent others from using the ideas that they've put considerable time and effort into discovering. In the US, this is a constitutional right, and from what I understand, it's thus inalienable.


No, copyright protection is not an "inalienable" right in the US, it is a legislated right which Congress could make disappear at any time.