Info/Law

My co-blogger Derek Bambauer must be too modest to promote his own stuff — or maybe he’s too busy driving across the country to his new job as a law professor — so I will point out that he presented the weekly lunch at the Berkman Center on Tuesday, where he discussed how intellectual property and other legal protections can interfere with robust software security research. He is working with fellow Berkmanite Phil Malone on a paper about the issue.

The podcast of Derek’s lunch is now available on the AudioBerkman site here. Ethan Zuckerman posted an excellent summary of the talk, the issue, and the critique that Derek drew from Simson Garfinkel, whom Ethan aptly describes as “a security researcher and world-class skeptic.”

This is a fascinating area fraught with multiple intersecting pros and cons, complex economic incentives, chilling effects, the application of old law to new technology, and lots of other juicy Info/Law resonance.

Filed under: Berkman, Scholarship, Security, Software