Cultural Environmentalism at 10

Sadly, I missed the second day of the Cultural Environmentalism at 10 symposium at Stanford University, which included what looked to be a very promising paper by Boalt Hall's Molly Van Houweling exploring how voluntary manipulation of intellectual property rights relates to both the conservation movement and the notion of cultural environmentalism. If, by the way, you want to check out the paper on the second enclosure movement that the symposium was on (based on the book Shamans, Software, and Spleens: Law and the Information Society), you can get it here.

So the two speakers I had the privilege of hearing were Madhavi Sunder of UC Davis Law and Susan Crawford of Fordham Law School.

Prof. Sunder spoke about intellectual property law and how cultural environmentalism relates to the relationship between IP law, our understanding of forms of knowledge, and the third world. Much of the paper centered around the GATT/WTO's Agreement on Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS) and India. The paper was ambitious in its scope, calling for what seemed to be a complete restructuring of the way IP law is applied to third world countries. For example, one of the main tenets of Sunder's changes would be to better respect local laws regarding property based on different cultural understandings of property rights. This would be a response to current IP law, which requires written evidence of the origination of an idea in order to press charges, thereby treating orally communicated ideas as unprotected. But, as more than a few members of the audience pointed out, the application of such broad changes seems impossible on a pragmatic level. While the commentary agreed that IP law wrongly treats traditional forms of knowledge as static, there didn't seem to be a workable alternative to the current IP framework. I thought the relationship between IP law and the third world was interesting, but framing the debate in terms of knowledge didn't strike me as more persuasive than the economic or human rights. Furthermore, because Prof. Sunder didn't have any specific examples (or what I felt would be specific examples) of when citizens of the third world have been exploited by IP law, it was hard to render any sense of urgency.

Prof. Crawford spoke about the telecommunications industry and the effects of the recent mergers, a topic I've taken a recent interest in. It was a call for a new social theory, or at least a new rhetoric with which to challenge the force of the telecos. Her suggestion was that the language of this new movement be articulated in terms of the public interest... which to me, made perfect sense, given both Boyle's emphasis on language in his essay on Cultural Environmentalism and the telecos' constant making property rights claims. The public interest is both a framework that brings seemingly disparate issues together (lack of access in rural America to broadband, lack of competition, innovation issues, etc.), and one that has the strength to counter the moral claims made by the telecos. Over the weekend, I emailed Prof. Crawford a couple of questions on her paper, and if/when I hear back from her, I'll discuss the mega-merger stuff more.

Attribution for Photo: The photo is Prof. Jamie Boyle, and comes directly from his website at http://www.law.duke.edu/boylesite/