Berkman Center Events & Webcasts

Berkman Center Luncheon Series
Guest: Michael Anti, New York Times Beijing Bureau and Nieman Fellow
Topic: “When the Decentralized and Democratized Internet Meets China”

Tuesday, November 27, 12:30 pm
Berkman Center Conference Room
23 Everett St., 2nd Floor, Cambridge MA

What is the result when decentralized and democratized Internet meets the central and undemocratic government with almost free and huge market? The Chinese blogosphere in the web 2.0 wave has different stories to tell. Internet has given Chinese people more freedom and chances, however, it has also given the ruling party more confidence to avoid the democracy. Michael Anti will explain what the motives of blogging are in China.

Bio

Michael Anti (Zhao Jing), a Nieman Fellow at Harvard. He is a journalism researcher with the Beijing Bureau of New York Times. He runs several political columns on Chinese top newspapers and magazines. He was a war reporter for a Chinese newspaper in Baghdad in March 2003. His well-known Chinese political blog was shutdown by Microsoft in December 2005. In the wake of this case, he turned to run a collaborative online weekly magazine on International politics. He is an international jury member of Deutsche Welle’s Best of Blogs competition in 2005, 2006 and 2007.

Webcast

This event will be webcast live. Webcast viewers can join the discussion through IRC text chat or in the virtual world Second Life. If you miss the live chat, catch the podcast audio & video at MediaBerkman.

RSVP is required, as space is limited. To RSVP, please send an email to rsvp@cyber.law.harvard.edu by November 26 at 12:00PM.

“Preliminary Thoughts on Copyright Reform”

Pam Samuelson
Professor of Law at UC Berkley, Visiting Professor of Law at Harvard Law School, and Berkman Center Faculty Fellow

Thursday, December 6, 5:00pm
Austin East Classroom
Harvard Law School
MAP

Copyright law is currently far too long, too complex, and largely incomprehensible, especially as to non-professionals. It is also the work product of pre-computer technology era. This law, moreover, lacks normative heft. That is, it does not embody a clear vision about what its normative purposes are.

This talk will offer some preliminary thoughts about why copyright reform is needed, why it will be difficult to undertake, and why notwithstanding these difficulties, it may nonetheless be worth doing. It offers suggestions about how one might go about trimming the statute to a more manageable length, articulating more simply its core normative purposes, and spinning certain situation-specific provisions off into a rulemaking process.

Thirty years after enactment of the ‘76 Act, with the benefit of considerable experience with computer and other advanced technologies and the rise of amateur creators, it may finally be possible to think through in a more comprehensive way how to adapt copyright to digital networked environments as well as how to maintain its integrity as to existing industry products and services that do not exist outside of the digital realm.

About Pam

Pamela Samuelson is a Professor at the University of California at Berkeley with a joint appointment in the School of Information Management and Systems and the School of Law. She is also Co-Director of the Berkeley Center for Law and Technology. Her principal area of expertise is intellectual property law. She has written and spoken extensively about the challenges that new information technologies are posing for public policy and traditional legal regimes and is an advisor for the Samuelson Law, Technology and Public Policy Clinic. Since 2002, she has also been an honorary professor at the University of Amsterdam.

The Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard Law School is proud to celebrate its tenth year as a research program founded to explore cyberspace, share in its study, and help pioneer its development. Through research, events, and discussion, Berkman@10 considers “The Future of the Internet” - to celebrate the work we have done together over the past decade, and to look ahead to what we hope to accomplish collectively in the next.

“Technology Standards, Patents and Antitrust”
 
François Lévêque
Visiting professor at the Boalt Hall School of Law, UC Berkeley and professor of Law and Economics at Cerna, Ecole des mines de Paris

Wednesday, November 28, 5:00pm
Langdell South Classroom
Harvard Law School
MAP

This event is free and open to the public.

The number of patents worldwide has increased enormously in the past 20 years, as has the number of technology standards. Standard setting organizations (“SSOs”) have proliferated to define common industry technology standards, which must then be licensed to users of the standard by their respective owners. Patent pools have become important mechanisms for efficiently licensing patents, which are often inevitable components of standards, and for mitigating the dangers of so-called “patent thickets.” Both SSOs and patent pools can be welfare enhancing and pro-competitive, but they also can raise challenging antitrust concerns including patent ambush and hold-up. Professor Leveque will describe his recent work that analyzes the economic and antitrust aspects of patent pools and SSOs, reviews recent antitrust cases against Rambus and Qualcomm for abuse of the standard-setting process, and recommends appropriate policies for antitrust analysis of standard setting.

About François

François Lévêque is professor of Law and Economics at Cerna, Ecole des mines de Paris, PARISTECH and visiting professor at the Boalt Hall School of Law, University of California at Berkeley

The Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard Law School is proud to celebrate its tenth year as a research program founded to explore cyberspace, share in its study, and help pioneer its development. Through research, events, and discussion, Berkman@10 considers “The Future of the Internet” - to celebrate the work we have done together over the past decade, and to look ahead to what we hope to accomplish collectively in the next.

Web of Ideas with David Weinberger
Wednesday, November 14, 6:30 PM
Berkman Center Conference Room
23 Everett St., 2nd Floor, Cambridge MA

“Designing Copyright from the Ground Up”: Suppose we had the chance to start over again with copyright, designing it to accommodate the digital era and designing it to support the greatest public good. What would it look like? How would we manage the clash between the need for leeway with the complete and precise knowledge of use that networked usage provides?

Web of Ideas is a Wednesday night discussion series at the Berkman Center, lead by Berkman Fellow David Weinberger, co-author of The Cluetrain Manifesto and author of Small Pieces Loosely Joined. Each session will begin with a 20 minute discussion-opener, followed by open conversation. Food will be provided, and meetings will take place at the Berkman Center.

Berkman Center Luncheon Series
Guest: Gary Kebbel of the Knight Foundation
Topic: “The Knight News Challenge and Digital Innovation: Challenges Posed by Intellectual Property, International Giving, and Grant Administration”

Tuesday, November 13, 12:30 pm
Berkman Center Conference Room
23 Everett St., 2nd Floor, Cambridge MA

If you do it right, giving away $25 million for digital innovation isn’t as easy as it sounds.

The Knight News Challenge is a $25 million, five-year quest for innovations in digital news and information that help build and bind community in a specific geographic area. As the Challenge ends its second year, the contest was revised to meet new goals, such as making grants to individuals in foreign countries or focusing the wisdom of the crowd on weak applications so that they could be strengthened and resubmitted. Additionally, $500,000 was set aside for the ideas of people 25-years-old and younger. These changes create new problems of grant administration, intellectual property and having a minor win a monetary award.

In this year’s open submission process, we encouraged people to rate and comment on, and thereby try to improve, initial applications. We allowed the applicant to take elements of public comments and incorporate them into a revised and resubmitted application. What if that application wins a grant? To whom should the grant be given? Who owns the intellectual property in that idea — the applicant only, or the applicant and the four or five people whose comments were incorporated to create the winning application?

About Gary

Gary Kebbel is the journalism program officer at the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation in Miami, Fla. In that role, he administers the Knight News Challenge, a $25 million contest to find digital news innovations that are used to create community in a given geographic area. At Knight Foundation, he also helped create the Knight Citizen News Network and the Knight Digital Media Center.

He directed the growth of AOL News into one of the largest news sites on the Internet, with an audience of up to 24 million people each month.

Kebbel just returned from South Africa where he was a Fulbright Senior Specialist in online journalism. He taught classes and helped with the creation of a digital media curriculum in the Journalism Department at Tshwane University of Technology in Pretoria, South Africa. He has been a trainer at the U.S. Foreign Service Institute, teaching public affairs officers how to better use the Internet in public diplomacy.

At AOL he also was the director of the largest election and politics site on the Internet and the largest government consumer portal, Government Guide.

He is a founding editor of USA TODAY.com and Newsweek.com, and was the night graphics editor at USA TODAY during the Gulf War, the end of the Cold War and the collapse of the Soviet Union.

Kebbel was an adjunct journalism instructor at the University of Maryland.

Links

* Knight Foundation
* Knight News Challenge

Webcast

This event will be webcast live. Webcast viewers can join the discussion through IRC text chat or in the virtual world Second Life. If you miss the live chat, catch the podcast audio & video at MediaBerkman.

RSVP is required, as space is limited. To RSVP, please send an email to rsvp@cyber.law.harvard.edu by November 12 at 12:00PM.

Harvard-MIT-Yale Cyberscholar Working Group
Wednesday, November 7, 6:00 pm
Berkman Center Conference Room
23 Everett St., 2nd Floor, Cambridge MA

The Cyberscholar Working Group is a collaboration between the Information Society Project at Yale Law School, the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard Law School, and the Comparative Media Studies program at the Massachusetts Institute of Techology. The working group is an opportunity for peer review and discussion of current projects submitted by a presenter. Discussion sessions are designed to facilitate advancements in the individual research of presenters and in turn encourage exposure among the participants to the multi-disciplinary features of the issues addressed by their own work.

The Berkman Center will be hosting this month’s Harvard-MIT-Yale Cyberscholar Working Group. We will be meeting next Wednesday, November 7, at 6pm in the Berkman Center conference room. Dinner will be provided.

We will have three presenters at this session:

* ISP Fellow Shlomit Wagman will present on her paper, “A New Model of Liability for Defective Software.”

* Kevin Driscoll from MIT Comparative Media Studies will give a multimedia presentation entitled “Thanx 4 Da Add: How Soulja Boy Hacked Mainstream Music.”

* Professor Eric Gordon of Emerson University and Berkman Fellow Gene Koo will present based on their paper, “Placeworlds: Using Virtual Worlds to Foster Civic Engagement.”

Presentation abstracts follow below. Longer versions of papers will be available shortly. If you plan to attend, please RSVP to Amar Ashar at  ashar at cyber.law.harvard.edu. For presenter bios and more information please visit the Cyberscholar web page.

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“A New Model of Liability for Defective Software”

* Abstract *

Software is a product with unique characteristics. Law should take into account those features when assessing how to apply tort doctrines to its defects. Current law has failed to do so, as it is not fully tailored to the Information Economy in general and information products in particular. This research provides a theoretical and normative foundation for a comprehensive legal approach to defective software, drawing on Innovation Policy. It calls for a paradigm shift and the establishment of a novel theoretical framework: one which is based on the premise that software is destined to fail, hence focusing on incentives for ex ante implementation of recovery and restoration measures rather than compensation for ex-post damages; one which builds upon the ever-changing nature of software and the online update mechanism (which replaces the traditional “recall”), while allocating some responsibilities to the user; one which promotes the values of collaboration and openness, providing the community with repair tools; and one which relies upon a new set of remedies, originating in information technologies. Three hypothetical cases, discussing data corruption, security breach and incompatibility between software, will be used to demonstrate the way such a model works. This research may have far-reaching implications when viewed as a case study of the general application of Innovation Policy in the Information Economy.

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“Thanks 4 Da Add: How Soulja Boy Hacked Mainstream Music”

* Abstract *

Armed with a camcorder, a computer, and a high-speed internet connection, Soulja Boy triggered the hottest dance craze since the macarena with a single video blog post to his MySpace page.  More than a series of dance steps, “Crank Dat” became an empowering stage upon which innumerable participants found safe space to perform their identities, signify their communities, and represent their localities. Fueled by a wealth of edits, remixes, and fan videos, the unsigned Soulja Boy ruled mainstream radio all summer before a major label deal came knocking. We’ll examine the origins of the craze, watch dozens of DIY music videos, and discuss the events following his signing.

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“Placeworlds: Using Virtual Worlds to Foster Civic Engagement”

* Abstract *

As a means of enabling communities to express their own visions of public and civic space, we have launched a program that looks to an unlikely tool to aid in the production of vividly real places: online virtual worlds. The program is called Hub2, and our goal is to strengthen the ability of neighborhood residents to make places. Online virtual worlds provide a unique opportunity for groups to dramatize their everyday lives through the production of virtual places in Second Life.

Berkman Center Luncheon Series

Tuesday, November 6, 12:30 pm
Berkman Center Conference Room
23 Everett St., 2nd Floor, Cambridge MA

Guest: Christine Harold, author of OurSpace and Assistant Professor, Department of Communication, University of Washington
Topic: “Inventing Publics: Kairos and Intellectual Property Law”

Christine Harold will explore the possibilities of the “open content” movement, specifically the licensing model offered by Creative Commons, as a productive alternative to other prevalent responses to the corporate hoarding of cultural resources. As she argues in her recent book OurSpace: Resisting the Corporate Control of Culture, rather than engaging commercial culture dialectically, an open content approach serves as a provocation to commercialism by amplifying certain market logics and, in doing so, undermines concepts such as “author” and “property” on which corporate power depends.

About Christine

Christine Harold, Assistant Professor, joined the faculty in 2007. She teaches courses in rhetorical criticism and theory, and cultural studies. Her research explores opportunities for meaningful political action in a world increasingly defined by the logics and rhetorics of the marketplace. Her book, OurSpace: Resisting the Corporate Control of Culture (University of Minnesota Press, 2007) examines “culture jamming” as a response to corporate power. Among other venues, her work has appeared in Rhetoric and Public Affairs, Critical Studies in Media Communication, and JAC. She is currently at work on a book about the intersections between product design, mass consumption, and environmental sustainability. Dr. Harold serves on the editorial boards of the Quarterly Journal of Speech, Western Journal of Communication, and Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies.

Links

• About Christine
• OurSpace
• Creative Commons
• Adbusters

Webcast

This event will be webcast live. Webcast viewers can join the discussion through IRC text chat or in the virtual world Second Life. If you miss the live chat, catch the podcast audio & video at MediaBerkman.

RSVP is required, as space is limited. To RSVP, please send an email to  rsvp at cyber.law.harvard.edu by November 5 at 12:00PM.

MIT Media Lab Colloquium series
Yochai Benkler
Cooperation and Human Systems Design

Monday November 5, 2007
Bartos Theater
4:00-5:30 pm

Globalization and rapid innovation cycles make the social and economic environment more complex and harder to characterize for planning or pricing. In response, we see adoption of loosely-bound, permeable human systems — technical platforms, business processes, and institutional devices — that enable pervasive experimentation and learning through decentralization of practical capacity and authority to act. Providing such practical freedom for human agency creates new challenges in design for cooperation. Doing so requires attention to work in social and biological sciences, political science and business management, that diverges from dominant interpretations of human action as selfishly motivated, and developes a more cooperative view of human nature, human interaction, or both. Observed heterogeneity of motivational profiles and practices of sustained cooperation suggests the potential for design aimed not at aligning individual selfish incentives, but at enabling the dynamics of self-reinforcing, cooperative social-psycological processes.

Bio: Yochai Benkler is the Berkman Professor of Entrepreneurial Legal Studies at Harvard, and faculty co-director of the Berkman Center for Internet and Society. Before joining the faculty at Harvard Law School, he was Joseph M. Field ‘55 Professor of Law at Yale. His books include The Wealth of Networks: How social production transforms markets and freedom (2006), which received the Don K. Price award from the American Political Science Association for best book on science, technology, and politics, the Donald McGannon award for best book on social and ethical relevance in communications policy research, was named best business book about the future by Stategy & Business, and otherwise enjoyed the gentle breath of Fortuna. His articles include Overcoming Agoraphobia (1997/98, initiating the debate over spectrum commons); Commons as Neglected Factor of Information Production (1998) and Free as the Air to Common Use (1998, characterizing the role of the commons in information production and its relation to freedom); From Consumers to Users (2000, characterizing the need to preserve commons as a core policy goal, across all layers of the information environment); Coase’s Penguin, or Linux and the Nature of the Firm (characterizing peer production as a basic phenomenon of the networked economy) and Sharing Nicely (2002, characterizing shareable goods and explaining sharing of material resources online). His work can be freely accessed at benkler.org. Benkler received the Electronic Frontier Foundation’s Pioneer Award in 2007, and the Public Knowledge IP3 Award in 2006.

Shared Culture Space Boston/Free Culture Present:
A Roundtable Discussion with Christine Harold, author of Ourspace
Monday, November 5, 7:00 pm
 Map