John Palfrey

As part of our Berkman@10 celebration this year, we at the Berkman Center tonight welcome Francois Leveque, professor at the Ecole des Mines, Paris, and visiting prof at the faculty of law at UC Berkeley. He’s presenting the findings of two new papers, each co-authored with Yann Meniere: “Technology standards, patents and antitrust” and “Licensing commitments in standard setting organizations.”

Prof. Leveque offers us a series of insights about the interaction of economics and law in the context of patents in the standards setting process. One key finding of his papers: it would be best for consumers and for innovation in general for the licensing of patents by players in standards setting processes to occur ex ante, rather than ex post. More surprising, he and M. Meniere argue that it also may be better, under some circumstances for the patent holder also to set the royalty level ex ante. He notes that, in this setting, the interests of consumers and patent owners are aligned. As he goes on to explain, in other settings, these interests may not be so well aligned. Read the papers for more insights, including with respect to the VITA royalty cap policies, ways to mitigate the costs of the risk of hold-up, and his proposal of announcing a royalty cap ex ante as a more flexible means of accomplishing such mitigation while still enabling patent holders to revise the royalties.

Prof. Leveque very kindly participated in both the Weissbad (Switzerland) and Cambridge (MA, USA) workshops that guided our work on Interoperability and Innovation over the past year. His interventions were crucial to informing our understanding of these complicated matters and he was unusually generous with his input, for which Urs Gasser and I and our teams are extremely grateful.

This year, the Berkman Center is celebrating its tenth anniversary. We’re spending the year, in part, reflecting on what we’ve learned in our first decade, where things stand now in our field, and where we ought to focus for our second decade. We’ll have a series of special events throughout the year, as well as a gala event from May 14 - 16, 2008. We hope very much to see lots of friends, old and new, over the course of the year.

We’ve also undertaken an effort this year to raise endowment-style funds for the Center to support our next ten years of operations. We’ve been very generously supported over the years, by the Berkman family and many others. Our mode has been not to have a permanent endowment, and we are not changing course in this regard, but rather we seek to raise funds on an entrepreneurial basis as we go along. We’re taking this tenth anniversary celebration as a time to achieve a bit more stability in our funding structure by raising funds to cover our core costs for our second decade.

We could not be happier that the MacArthur Foundation has decided to give us a $4 million award, our largest ever gift outside of the ongoing generosity of the Berkman family. This award from the MacArthur Foundation is the anchor to what we intend to make a successful effort to ensure that we have the resources to do our work even better in our second decade than we have in our first. I’m confident that the importance of the issues of Internet and society only grow more important and central to the lives of people around the world with each passing year.

The MacArthur Foundation has been exceptionally helpful to us on many levels as we go about our public-spirited work. The foundation’s president, Jonathan Fanton, the vice-president Elspeth Revere, and program officer John Bracken have contributed to our work in so many substantive and philanthropic ways. We’re extremely grateful.

At the Berkman Center’s lunch speaker series, Gary Kebbel of the Knight Foundation is with us today. I’m not sure that I’ve ever seen such a public, open discussion by a program officer of a foundation about how they do their work in funding great projects. The Knight Foundation has been running the News Challenge for a few years, and they seek to learn and improve their processes each time. This year, they doubled the number of applications and, even more impressive, they reached out successfully to a global set of applicants (good news, we think, coming from the Global Voices-style perspective, as we do here at the Berkman Center). Knight has also continued to innovate with ways for people to submit public or private applications to the consideration process.  One thing I learned: News Challenge applicants are free to read these comments, in the case of an open application, and then go back and revise and improve their application. They’ve also got a blog on PBS called Idea Lab, part of the PBS Media Shift blogging empire (hey! there’s David Ardia).

In the spirit of our interest in young people, Digital Natives, doing innovative things online: The most interesting experiment, from my perspective, is their work with MTV and MTV International on the Young Creators Award. They set aside $500,000 for this award, geared toward those 25-years-old and younger. Of the new young applicants, almost half are international.

Some of the upticks that they are seeing in the applications to this year’s News Challenge: Facebook applications, use of GPS-related tools, and place-tagging for wireless.

Grant-seekers and innovators and young creators around the world, watch Gary explain how the sausage is made when it comes to grant-making at the Knight Foundation. Watch also for commentary from uber-bloggers Ethan Zuckerman and David Weinberger and Lisa Williams, who are in the room here in real-time.

At a focus group today for the digital natives project (and our book, Born Digital), an interviewee mentioned VoteGopher.  It’s very clever: a site by students that helps you decide who to vote for.  The founder is a Harvard College sophomore, Will Ruben.  It’s a much more fun and interesting site that some of the traditional voter-information sites.  A combination of straightforward user-interface and lots of information goes a long way.  Check out the page on Barack Obama, then compare candidate positions on various issues.

The ambition of young Americans to have an impact on our political scene may be our saving grace. Bravo to Scoop08 co-founders Alexander Heffner and Andrew Mangino for kicking off “A New Kind of Newspaper,” where 400+ students will cover the 2008 presidential campaign. If you grow up with a sense that you can speak and be heard, you may bother to participate more throughout your life. Experiments of the sort that they are undertaking give reason for hope that the Internet may yet help to fuel the civic involvement of young Americans, now and into the future.

One of the themes of Born Digital, the book Urs Gasser and I are working on, is excitement around the possibility of an emerging global culture of young people who use technology in particular ways. (We’re equally interested in the problems of those who may be left out of that emerging culture, too, as Ethan Zuckerman and Eszter Hargittai and others are quick to remind us.) It was fun, in this context, to see a few international responses to / reverberations of our post about definitions and subtleties around who is a “digital native” and who is not: one from Canada’s paper of record, the Globe and Mail; a few in Spanish; and a few in German; in Italian; and from our friend and colleague Shenja on the Media@LSE (London School of Economics) blog.

(Since this is a joint research project with our colleagues at the University of St. Gallen in Switzerland, I suppose it’s not really surprising — the conversation actually started internationally.)