Check out Becker and Posner on sustainable development.
As I have suggested before, I believe sustainable development, intergenerational equity and other guiding normative principles that have grown up in the (international) environmental policy arena ought to be “mapped” to the intellectual property and communications/Internet arenas. Easier said than done, I suppose. One difficulty, among many perhaps, is that the principles themselves are contested and can be somewhat fuzzy around the edges, and when applied to a given policy problem, may lead to more questions than concrete answers (e.g., see concluding paragraph). At least, by incorporating some of these principles, however, we might begin asking the right questions and our analysis might be guided by normative commitments that have gained widespread acceptance in recent years.
Interesting. In the context of copyright and the unlimited extension thereof, creativity might well be “unsustainable,” given that with enough time and legal resources, sufficiently large entities will be able to deter production of many new creative works for fear of legal complications. “Sustainable development” of human creative works may require “recycling” of older concepts by naturally letting their copyright terms expire.
Or is this not what you’re getting at? The concept, whatever it is, is awesome, and blew my mind.
Comments are closed.