Center For Internet And Society

On March 11-12, 2006, Stanford Law School's Center for Internet and Society hosted a symposium to explore the development and expansion of the metaphor of "cultural environmentalism" over the course of ten busy years for intellectual property law. We invited four scholars to present original papers on the topic, and a dozen intellectual property experts to comment and expand on their works. In current debates about a "two-tiered internet," the romantic figure of the "network builder" is being used to end the arguments about desirable social policy that otherwise should occur. If only we had a more natural name for this network of networks than the internet; if only more people understood it to be a deeply human endeavor whose value comes from all of us; if only it were more visible as a social, self-reflected, self-entailed world that happens to be connected by machines. The internet needs a lobbyist. More importantly, however, it needs a new social theory. The theory that will see us through focuses on th