John Palfrey

One of the questions we get all the time is: “how do I know what’s legal and illegal when I’m podcasting?” It’s one of those questions that can make a lawyer cringe, because you either 1) spend the rest of the cocktail party trying to give a decent answer or 2) you have to say it’s too complicated and the person should hire a lawyer.

So, a better answer: check out the hot-off-the-press Podcasting Legal Guide — not legal advice, exactly, but a wonderful text with answers to most questions, prepared through a joint initiative of Creative Commons (especially their terrific GC, Mia Garlick) and the law clinics at the Stanford Center for Internet & Society and the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard Law School.

This morning, we are hosting an eminent group of academics here at Harvard Law School for a symposium on blogging and legal scholarship. Prof. Paul Caron is leading off right now. You can tune in to the webcast, if you are not local to Cambridge. (If you needed any further incentive to watch, Prof. Michael Froomkin promises to announce a new project just after 11:00 a.m.)

Meanwhile, a Maine blogger has been sued for $1 million for blog posts critical of the advertising campaign of a state agency in Maine. The Boston Globe reports: “Warren Kremer Paino Advertising LLC, an agency hired by the Maine Department of Tourism, filed suit in US District Court in Maine last week, alleging the blogger, Lance Dutson of Searsmont, Maine, outside Camden, violated the agency’s copyright and defamed the agency in blog entries self-published at www.mainewebreport.com.” My view is that a lawsuit of this sort should have to clear a very high bar before a court awards damages to the design firm, especially where the core discussion is a matter of political speech in which a citizen is commenting on the activities of a state agency of his home state.

And, today, we are releasing a brand-new blogs server at Harvard Law, running a new instantiation of WordPress. It reminds me of the heady days when Dave Winer, back in Christmas Break 2002, first joined us at the Berkman Center and pulled us all into this business as the pied piper of citizen-generated media here at Harvard. Core to Dave’s blogging initiative here was to put up the first-ever community blogs server at a university.

I am reminded of an article that the Harvard Gazette published back in 2003, in the early days of the initiative. I think it’s safe, now, to say that this blogging initiative has been a big, maybe even unqualified, success — with several hundred members of the Harvard community blogging, whether on our server or otherwise; a vibrant group whose (completely open set of) members still meet every Thursday night at the Berkman Center; the first series of podcasts and extensions of that tradition; and so forth. Come a long way, since then, with lots of great people picking up the legacy and extending it, like all those working on Global Voices. Thanks, Dave.

Prof. Yochai Benkler is making the argument(s) of his new book, The Wealth of Networks, (500+ pages; buy it or write about it),
in 30 minutes here in Hauser 102 at HLS.  Whew — a lot of big
ideas, and big words, in a short space.  He is considering two
large problems.

1) What are the stable changes in the production of human knowledge and information?

- Commons-based production: the key is production without exclusion.

- Peer-production: large-scale cooperation among human contributors
without price signals or managerial commands.  Free and open
source software is hard to argue with, because it’s succeeded in the
marketplace.  But the phenomenon of peer production is in fact
ubiquitous.

- Most critical shift in terms of new opportunities: new platforms for
self-expression and collaboration.  People are trying to make
money from getting the point that platforms for self-expression can be
powerful: that’s what Web 2.0 is.

- IBM makes more in revenues from Linux-related activities than from patent revenues.

- These changes are a challenge to incumbent business models. 
These changes are threatened by IP laws and other funky new technology
laws.

2) And on to the politics: why should we care about the outcome of these political debates?

- Three reasons to care: autonomy (more we can do ourselves, or in
loose collaboration with others — see David Weinberger, Project Gutenberg), justice and
development, and democracy.

- There is no major democratic state that doesn’t post-date the rise of
mass media.  What does democracy look like when we introduce
social production?  Pentagon Paper is an early and important
example.  Diebold is a new one, in the lead-up to the 2004
election is
another, with Bev Harris and her distributed friends.  (Read the
book!)

Yale Law School Prof. Yochai Benkler is here at Berkman for the day as
part of his book tour for The Wealth of Networks.  At fellows’
hour, prompted by a back-and-forth about whether Cass Sunstein was
right in his famous Republic.com argument (about the Daily Me), David
Weinberger took issue with the idea that we should read or listen to
those with whom we disagree.  “I do not,” he said, “have an open
mind.  It would take the Rapture to convince me that Bush was
right.”  One for the quote wall.

John Clippinger says that it’s really about structuring different kinds
of conversations, not necessarily about eating our spinach and
listening to
[fill-in-the-blank-radio-shock-jock] with whom one disagrees.

At fellows hour today at Berkman, David Weinberger, in response to the
presumption that it’s important for us to listen to the views of those
whose viewpoints we disagree with: “I do NOT have an open mind.” 
And, “it would take the Rapture to convince me that Bush was right.”

This semester, our class on Internet, Law and Politics has been led
through the power of new networks to affect politics by a new book, the
Wealth of Networks, by Yochai Benkler.  This book is bound to be
one of the most important statements on technology and politics of this
generation.  It’s our great pleasure to
welcome Prof. Benkler to HLS tomorrow night in person.  We hope
you
will join us.

Festivities begin on Tuesday late afternoon, April 18, 2006, at 5:45 p.m. for a
short talk by Yochai Benkler
in Hauser Hall room 102 at Harvard Law School, and then a party in
honor and in celebration of his new book at the Berkman Center
immediately thereafter (at 1587 Mass Ave, Cambridge).  Prof. Benkler
has recently published his book, “*The Wealth of Networks: How Social
Production Transforms Markets and Freedom*,” through the Yale
University Press.

Prof. Benkler’s research at Yale Law School focuses on the effects of
laws that regulate information production and exchange on the
distribution of control over information flows, knowledge, and culture
in the digital environment. His particular focus has been the neglected
role of commons-based approaches toward management of resources in the
digitally networked environment, the increasing importance of nonmarket
production in general and collaborative peer production in particular,
and the significance of these phenomena in both economic and political
terms. “The Wealth of Networks” is a comprehensive social theory of the
Internet and the networked information economy. In it, Benkler describes
how patterns of information, knowledge, and cultural production are
changing—and shows that the way information and knowledge are made
available can either limit or enlarge the ways people can create and
express themselves.

More information on the book (and ordering information) is available at here, and you
may download it (and much more) on his wiki.  For directions
and maps, please see http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/home/contact.  Erica George at the Berkman Center is in charge — phone is 617-495-7547.  Hope to see you there.

This semester, our class on Internet, Law and Politics has been led
through the power of new networks to affect politics by a new book, the
Wealth of Networks, by Yochai Benkler.  I am certain that this
book will be one of the most important statements on technology and
politics of this generation.  It’s our great pleasure to welcome
Prof. Benkler to HLS tomorrow night in person.  We hope you will
join us.

Festivities begin on Tuesday late afternoon, April 18, 2006, at 5:45 p.m. for a
short talk by *Yochai Benkler*
in Hauser Hall room 102 at Harvard Law School, and then a party in
honor and in celebration of his new book at the Berkman Center
immediately thereafter (at 1587 Mass Ave, Cambridge).  Prof.
Benkler has recently published his book, “*The Wealth of Networks: How
Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedom*,” through the Yale
University Press.

Prof. Benkler’s research at Yale Law School focuses on the effects of
laws that regulate information production and exchange on the
distribution of control over information flows, knowledge, and culture
in the digital environment. His particular focus has been the neglected
role of commons-based approaches toward management of resources in the
digitally networked environment, the increasing importance of nonmarket
production in general and collaborative peer production in particular,
and the significance of these phenomena in both economic and political
terms. “The Wealth of Networks” is a comprehensive social theory of the
Internet and the networked information economy. In it, Benkler describes
how patterns of information, knowledge, and cultural production are
changing—and shows that the way information and knowledge are made
available can either limit or enlarge the ways people can create and
express themselves.

More information on the book (and ordering information) is available at here, and you
may download it (and much more) on his wiki.  For directions
and maps, please see http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/home/contact.  Erica George at the Berkman Center is in charge — phone is 617-495-7547.  Hope to see you there.

I just received in the mail the hard-copy edition of the Sixteenth Annual Theodore H. White Lecture, hosted by the Joan Shorenstein Center at the Kennedy School at Harvard.  Peter Beinart, editor-at-large of the New Republic gave the lecture on October 27, 2005.  The full text is worth reading.  (It is available online
as a video file, but I can’t find the text online yet; looks like
previous iterations have been posted in PDF.)  Since it is not
easily in text form yet, I thought I’d excerpt a bit from the end of
his lecture, right before Q&A (at which point Alex Jones, the
distinguished director of Shorenstein, steps back in to moderate).

“The achievement, I think, of the Clinton and the DLC generation was,
in fact, to think about first principles, to think about the
relationships between state and civil society, to think about the
ability of the market to achieve traditional, liberal ends.  I
think that’s fundamentally what distinguished them from the
neo-liberals like Gary Hart and Michael Dukakis, who had emerged in the
1970s and ’80s.”

(FWIW, I am with him up to here, for certain.)

“My fear is that the new blogosphere generation, the one that’s
emerging today, the children of Howard Dean, is so focused on
organizational and tactical questions about how the Democratic Party
can frame its message, they’re not focused nearly enough on what the
Democratic Party and what liberals believe.  That they are so tied
into the party structure itself that they don’t spend nearly enough
time thinking about what Democrats believe. …

“Let me just end with a word about what this means for liberal
journalism, because one of the striking things about the bloggers is
that they are not only activists, but they are journalists, too. 
The blogs blur that division.  Their stress on tactics, on winning
elections rather than on first principle, I think, is bad for liberal
opinion writing.

“The bloggers are helping to create a journalistic culture with too
much focus on what will help Democrats win, too much interest in the
short-term.  And it’s producing cramped, small-bore, predictable
and, perhaps worst of all, dull political writing.  It’s not what
liberals need today.  It’s not what opinion journalism needs
today.  It’s not even what the Democratic Party needs today, and I
don’t think Teddy White would have approved.”

The right call to arms, missing the point, or some of both?

Harvard Law School students in “Internet, Law and Politics” have developed this site
to build out their arguments about the ethics and legality of United
States technology companies operating in China and participating in its
filtering and surveillance regime.  There are five people
testifying in class today, each have posted their testimony online.

Berkman senior geek-in-residence Luis Villa spoke over the weekend at LinuxWorld Boston; Tina Gasperson and Slashdot covered his talk.