NYU Law School Clinic Attempting to Obtain Copyright for a Forest

As I have noted here before, NYU Law School’s radical MOTH (More Than Human Life) program embraces neo-earth mysticism as part of its efforts to promote “nature rights.” Here’s the latest example. MOTH participants are seeking to force the Ecuadorian Copyright Office to grant a copyright to a forest as the supposed co-composer of music called Song of the Cedars.

From “Giving Back to Nature,” published on the MOTH website:

The aim of the song and its accompanying legal petition is to recognize—legally and culturally—the inextricable agency and participation of the natural world in the making of art. The song could not have been made without Los Cedros, legally and philosophically justifying the effort to acknowledge the forest’s “moral authorship” in the song’s creation. Moreover, the hope is that pushing for recognition of Los Cedros’ authorship will trigger a change in the profoundly anthropocentric realm of copyright law.

While human musical creations have used sounds of nature since time immemorial—and some have recognized nature’s role in them—this initiative is the first known legal attempt to recognize an ecosystem as the moral co-author of a song or other work of art.

This is crackers — like so much of contemporary “nature rights”-based advocacy. A forest does not have agency. It can’t author anything. It is incapable of creative acts.

A copyright recognizes and protects original intellectual property brought forth through human creative effort. The sound effects recorded in the forest, as beautiful as they may be, were not authorship, but bugs, birds, and animals making noises, and the wind blowing through the trees. Indeed, it took human beings to recognize their beauty and incorporate them in their — not the forest’s — music.

Why target Ecuador for this foolishness, you ask? Because the country unwisely incorporated the rights of “nature” — called “Pachamama” after the Incan earth goddess — into its constitution. With that precedent, the gambit just might work.

MOTH’s programs are not benign. Law, its practice, and administration should be based on logic and applied principles, furthered by a way of thinking inculcated in law school students during their preparation to enter the profession.

In contrast, neo-pagan mysticism promotes feelings above thought. It’s not that feelings have no place in the legal system, but they should not control most legal outcomes. They are like the proverbial house built on sand. We may “feel” very strongly that something is “right” today, but shift to a completely different outlook tomorrow.

We certainly have a human obligation to properly husband the environment — as we also benefit from earth’s bounty. That requires human exceptionalism, not woo-woo sentimentality of the kind that MOTH promotes.