Kaye Trammell on the proper aspiration of the Internet researcher: “We should work not just to get published and define or classify a medium. Instead, we should work to add to the medium — to add to society’s understanding of it.” Straight out of the Berkman Center mission statement. A perfect reason why we should be involved in and studying what’s happening today with weblogs — even if there is too much hype around.
At long last, Andrew McLaughlin has a weblog. Such good news. Not suprisingly, he’s out of the gate with a real gusto. His post of today: on VoIP (Voice-over-Internet- Protocol), entitled, “Judge Davis Gets it: The Internet is not a Telephone.” Andrew is first-among-equals of a group of us team-teaching a class called Digital Democracy, which, so far, anyway, I think should be subtitled, “So tell me again how VoIP doesn’t change everything?” Andrew wrote more on the same issue a previous case in a post at xDev.
Here’s the opinion.
On Wednesday night, HLS feted Prof. William W. (”Terry”) Fisher III as he received the Hale and Dorr Intellectual Property chair. It was an exceptional event: a standing-room-only crowd in Austin East and a lecture, prompted by Dean Elena Kagan’s inauguration of a new-to-HLS-but-nonetheless-venerable tradition, on the state of the field of the freshly-chaired professor. The lecture, entitled “The Disaggregation of Intellectual Property,” is online here as part of the Berkman media library, and well worth the hour spent watching it. It’s rare to see someone endeavor to describe the state of their field — let alone a field as complex as intellectual property law — and Prof. Fisher does an exceptional job of it.
