Cultural environmentalism
If --
the public domain : Yellowstone Park ::
librarians : park rangers?
My theoretical SAT question is based on this:
Ten years ago, Duke Law Professor Jamie Boyle suggested that the history of the environmental movement offered powerful theoretical and practical lessons to those who sought to recognize the importance of the public domain, and to expose the harms caused by a relentlessly maximalist program of intellectual property expansion.
Stanford Law School is holding a free conference this weekend on the cultural environmentalism theory and its application to protecting the public domain and fair use.
As a quasi-legal theory, the analogy makes sense. Copyright is viewed as property right. As much as the environmental movement is motivated to constrain the unfettered discretion of property owners in order to conserve/preserve/make more widely available physical resources for the public good, cultural environmentalism is motivated to constrain the unfettered discretion of copyright owners to conserve/preserve/make more widely available intellectual content and cultural materials for the public good.
But is the analogy sufficient? Should those of us who are concerned about fair use and the public domain consider ourselves environmentalists of a sort? Should this be a purely theoretical construct, or should cultural environmentalism follow the same or similar strategies as the physical environmental movement?
And, of course, there is my standard question for these things: where do librarians/archivists/etc. fit into the equation? And as is often, I have no firm answers, but I look forward to learning more at the conference (although I'll miss the first half of it).