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Tomorrow’s New York Times Magazine has this piece on the current battles over copyright and their implications for the future of our culture.

While the American copyright system was designed to encourage innovation, it is now, they contend, being used to squelch it. They see themselves as fighting for a traditional understanding of intellectual property in the face of a radical effort to turn copyright law into a tool for hoarding ideas. ”The notion that intellectual property rights should never expire, and works never enter the public domain — this is the truly fanatical and unconstitutional position,” says Jonathan Zittrain, a co-founder of the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard Law School, the intellectual hub of the Copy Left.

I especially like Professor Boyle’s analogy at the end of the article:

The future of the Copy Left’s efforts is still an open question. James Boyle has likened the movement’s efforts to establish a cultural commons to those of the environmental movement in its infancy. Like Rachel Carson in the years before Earth Day, the Copy Left today is trying to raise awareness of the intellectual ”land” to which they believe we ought to feel entitled and to propose policies and laws that will preserve it. Just as the idea of environmentalism became viable in the wake of the last century’s advances in industrial production, the growth of this century’s information technologies, Boyle argues, will force the country to address the erosion of the cultural commons. ”The environmentalists helped us to see the world differently,” he writes, ”to see that there was such a thing as ‘the environment’ rather than just my pond, your forest, his canal. We need to do the same thing in the information environment. We have to ‘invent’ the public domain before we can save it.”

Is The Future of Ideas our Silent Spring?