Stanford's Center for Internet and Society has just announced Cultural Environmentalism at 10, a conference to gauge the progress of the "cultural environmentalist movement," as defined ten years ago by uber-copyfighter Professor James Boyle. It brings together a remarkable brain trust of leading thinkers on the digital commons to consider whether, as Boyle proposed, using lessons from the environmentalist movement has helped us to valorize the public domain and expose the social, cultural, and economic harms caused by its increasing enclosure. Given what's happening right now on Capitol Hill -- that is, IP maximalists arguing before Congress that fair use has outlived its usefulness -- the conference could not possibly be more timely.

On March 11-12, 2006, Stanford Law School's Center for Internet and Society will host 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've invited four scholars to present original papers on the topic, and a dozen intellectual property experts to comment and expand on their works.

Molly Van Houweling explores voluntary manipulation of intellectual property rights as a tool for cultural environmentalism. Susan Crawford extends Boyle's analysis to the age of networks. Rebecca Tushnet looks at the ways in which the law's impulse to generalize complicates the project of cultural environmentalism, and Madhavi Sunder looks at how the metaphor affects traditional knowledge. Professor Boyle will also offer some remarks, as will Stanford Law School's Professor Lawrence Lessig.

Comments on the papers by: Terry Fisher, Harvard Law School, Jack Balkin, Yale Law School, Arti Rai, Duke Law School, Pam Samuelson, UC Berkeley School of Law: Boalt Hall, Neil Netanel, UCLA Law School, Julie Cohen, Georgetown University Law Center, Jessica Litman, Wayne University, Mark Lemley, Stanford Law School, Peggy Radin, Stanford Law School, Yochai Benkler, Yale Law School, Siva Vaidhyanathan, NYU School of Law. [Hyperlinks are mine.]

Bonus: Courtesy of Peter Suber @ Open Access News, the webcast of the recent MIT Communications Forum presentation, The Future of the Digital Commons, featuring Nancy Kranich, Ann Wolpert, and Steven Pinker. For those of you to whom the concept of the digital commons is brand new, it's a lucid, engaging introduction.