Wednesday, May 23, 2007

Internet & Society Conference 2007

University: Knowledge Beyond Authority at Harvard Law School

A plug for an amazing event June 1st at the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University. This year's conference focuses on "UNIVERSITY – Knowledge Beyond Authority," revolving around the question, "What is the role of University in cyberspace?"

A dream team line-up will be at the event, including

Nicholas Negroponte, Chairman of One Laptop per Child Project;
Lewis Hyde, Berkman Center for Internet & Society Fellow and author of The Gift: Imagination and the Erotic Life of Property;
John Wilbanks, Executive Director, Science Commons

Please consider stopping by!

Sunday, May 13, 2007

Pondering

Well, it's been a rollercoaster keeping up with all the developments in cyberlaw and intellectual property. Just receiving the BNA Newsletter was enough to saturate your average college student, let alone one who wished to chase down the various leads that the newsletter suggests.

My biggest reward for this semester has been the realization of the variety and nuance in cyberlaw. It is an engaging and evolving field, and very exciting in that it offers to many gray areas, areas that are bound to change as technical capabilities change alongside social practices and norms.

The internet offers an unparalleled venue in which to play out a multitude of human interaction. And as we have now learned of humans, interaction often entails conflict. And where conflict arises, the law steps in. This legal intervention has been particularly enchanting for me. How can we modify the law to better serve the people using it? How do we adapt legal conventions to fit emerging technologies? Cyberlaw is quite a multifaceted field, and I am happy to have waded through some of its many topics.

Sunday, May 6, 2007

Diggers: The Power of a Crowd

Recently there has been quite a flurry of activity on Digg.com, an internet site aggregating page rankings and summarizing links. A situation arose in which an encryption key used in HD-DVD and Blu-Ray anti-copying technology was posted on numerous pages. Digg.com received several cease-and-desist letters, and made efforts to remove links to the encryption code.

Diggers rioted.

They furiously posted about the rights of users to display and link the information, and they protested the lengths in which the content industries have been overzealous in their IP protection. Digg.com responded to the posts and has decided to allow the encryption code to remain on the site. They claim that they would rather go down fighting than cave in to censorship.

As for the encryption code, it goes down in cyberhistory. You can even buy the T-shirt:

I WANT MY HD-DVD 09-f9-11-02-9d-74 e3-5b-d8-41-5..