Tech Companies Called on The Carpet in DC. Again.

Google, Yahoo!, and Cisco faced questions from the subcommittee on human rights (part of the Senate Judiciary Committee) about their role in China’s Internet censorship system. Cisco was in particularly hot water after an internal document surfaced - it discusses how Cisco technology can “Combat ‘Falun Gong’ evil religion and other hostiles.” Senator Dick Durbin […]

Harvard Law Faculty Commits to Open Access to Scholarship

I’ve been sitting on this post for what seems like an eternity, but the news embargo has been lifted, and we’re all free to share the fantastic news from Harvard Law School, where the faculty voted unanimously to provide open access to faculty scholarship in an online repository. This makes Harvard the nation’s first […]

U.S. Hotels in China to Filter the ‘Net?

Sen. Sam Brownback (R-KS) claims that U.S. hotel chains in China are being pressed to install filtering software to control what material guests access on-line. Having the Olympic Games in China this summer helpfully focuses attention on the country’s Internet censorship regime - arguably the most sophisticated in the world. That said, I’m a bit […]

Companies Enabling Censorship

Xeni Jardin of BoingBoing writes a great op-ed in the New York Times on the use of American technology, from companies such as Secure Computing and Websense, in helping authoritarian countries censor the Internet. (Presumably space was too short for her to mention Cisco in China, or Fortinet, which both helps Burma and misled ONI […]

Cyber/IP Law Prof Larry Lessig Mulling a Run for Congress

Stanford law professor Larry Lessig, a co-founder of Harvard’s Berkman Center for Internet & Society and an author of many influential works in the domain of cyberlaw and intellectual property, announced today that he is thinking of running for Congress to fill the seat recently opened by the death of Rep. Tom Lantos. More […]

Legal Threats Database Launched

The Citizen Media Law Project has launched what looks like it could be a fantastic new resource: the Legal Threats Database. They plan to chronicle “lawsuits, cease & desist letters, subpoenas, and other legal threats directed at those who engage in online speech” and allow users to “view, search, and comment on entries in […]

Off the Bus in NYT

The ultimate MSM outlet, the New York Times, took a look today at Off the Bus, a still-new venture supported by the Huffington Post that is trying to harness the unruly but potentially powerful forces of crowdsourced reporting to cover the 2008 election campaign. Among their many advantages, they have Berkman alum Amanda Michel […]

Teaching Non-Lawyers

In the last few days I’ve been at two gigs involving teaching about law to non-lawyers. It is an eye-opening and highly recommended experience.
Last week I was on the faculty of the annual Summer Doctoral Programme sponsored by the Oxford Internet Institute and this year hosted in the U.S. by the Berkman Center at […]

Free Speech and Free Trade

Rebecca Mackinnon, a journalism professor at the University of Hong Kong (who is also a former Berkman fellow, co-founder of Global Voices, and CNN bureau chief in Beijing and Tokyo) has a long thoughtful post about the effort to establish social responsibility standards for international internet companies that must grapple with issues of censorship and […]

Technical Difficulties (Please Stand By)

We have heard from a number of readers about problems viewing the blog — particularly, it seems, on the new Internet Explorer 7. (Yet another strike against restrictive and metadata-searching Vista…) There is a major upgrade coming soon on the Harvard blog server run by the Berkman Center, which graciously continues to host […]

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