Private Censorship and Perfect Choice: The Future of the Internet?

Les Todd.

A Conversation with James Boyle and Adrienne Davis was the theme of Duke Magazine's second annual Campus Forum, held March 28 and co-sponsored with Duke's law school and the Center for the Study of the Public Domain.

Boyle (right), William Neal Reynolds Professor of Law, discussed with Davis (left), a law professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, a "new environmentalism for the information age" that "first seeks to invent the public domain and then save it." Much of the questioning from the audience--including prospective law students--focused on ethical and legal issues associated with downloading music and films over the Internet. Boyle is the author of Shamans, Software, and Spleens: Law and the Construction of the Information Society. Davis is a frequent commentator on controversial issues of privacy law, property, and social power.

The magazine's inaugural Campus Forum, held last year, featured Stanley Hauerwas, Gilbert T. Rowe Professor of Theological Ethics in the Duke Divinity School.