Environmentalism for the Internet?

James Boyle at Duke Law School thinks that for the politics of intellectual property, we need the model of environmentalism to understand how to deal with it, and solve some of the problems.

Paper here: A Politics of Intellectual Property: Environmentalism for the Net?

The second key factor is the decreasing importance, literally the diminishing marginal cost, of medium as opposed to message... In the information economy, the medium is not the message. The medium is irrelevant.

...The intellectual property regime could make -- or break -- the educational, political, scientific and cultural promise of the Net. Indeed, even if our only concern were censorship, it would be perverse to concentrate exclusively on the direct criminalisation of content by governments. The digital world gives new salience to private censorship -- the control by intellectual property holders of distribution of and access to information. The recent Scientology cases are only the most obvious manifestation of this tendency.

Posted by Mary Hodder at January 20, 2003 08:09 AM | TrackBack