Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society: Audio Fishbowl

Listen: or download | …also in Ogg How have politically engaged organizations used the web to fundamentally change how people organize and engage politically? Why are left wing organizations more likely to succeed in organization online? Why are conservatives less funny than liberals? David Karpf chronicles the dozens of Netroots political organizations, both progressive and [...]

Over the past year, the public has started to learn about the shadowy trade in software security exploits. Rather than disclosing these flaws to software vendors like Google and Microsoft who will then fix them, security researchers can now sell them for six figures to governments who then use them for interception, espionage and cyber [...]

How do you make your own work Open Access (OA)? The question comes up from researchers at schools with good OA policies (like Harvard and MIT) and at schools with no OA policies at all. In recognition of Open Access Week, Peter Suber — Director of the Harvard Open Access Project — and Stuart Shieber [...]

Under conventional wisdom, intellectual property is simply a tool for promoting innovative products, from iPods to R2D2. But intellectual property does more than incentivize the production of more goods; IP law governs the abilities of human beings to make and share culture, and to profit from this enterprise in a global knowledge economy. In this [...]

Most tools that scientists use for the preparation of scholarly manuscripts, such as Microsoft Word and LaTeX, function offline and do not account for the born-digital nature of research objects. And most authoring tools in use today are not designed for collaboration, and, as scientific collaborations grow in size, research transparency and the attribution of [...]

Listen: or download | …also in Ogg The Internet exists and persists on the border between helpful and harmful, between freedom and totalitarianism, access to knowledge and censorship. But as long as technology is adaptable activists will be learning and creating workarounds to spread information and promote change. Enter the Circumvention Tools Hackfest, a four-day [...]

Over the past two decades copyright law has become a major impediment to learning and teaching processes. The use of copyrighted materials for educational purposes is, indeed, at the core of fair use. Yet, the high level of uncertainty regarding the particular scope of permissible uses prevents universities and colleges from exercising fair use on [...]

While serving as the de facto standard for secure web browsing, in many ways the security of HTTPS is broken. In the long term, a robust technical and policy overhaul must address the systemic weaknesses of HTTPS. Nico van Eijk —Professor of Media and Telecommunications Law and Director of the Institute for Information Law — [...]

Infrastructure resources are the subject of many contentious public policy debates, including what to do about crumbling roads and bridges, whether and how to protect our natural environment, energy policy, even patent law reform, universal health care, network neutrality regulation and the future of the Internet. Brett Frischmann — professor at Cardozo Law School and [...]

The internet lets us share perfect copies of our work with a worldwide audience at virtually no cost. We take advantage of this revolutionary opportunity when we make our work “open access”: digital, online, free of charge, and free of most copyright and licensing restrictions. In this talk, Peter Suber — Director of the Harvard [...]

Listen: or download | …also in Ogg Disseminating knowledge was once a costly undertaking. The expenses of printing, distributing, and housing the work of researchers and scholars left most research in the hands of publishers, journals, and institutions in a system that has evolved over centuries. And the licensing model that has arisen with that system [...]

In the olden days, a writer hoped to catch the eye of an aristocratic patron who might supply a well-placed word of endorsement. The Gutenberg press wrested authors free from this feudal condition, only transfer writers’ indenture to publishers, who by owning the means of [re]production acquired the final say regarding what volumes would and [...]

In the last few years, the war among drug cartels and the Mexican authorities has intensified, claiming the lives of many innocent people. Citizens, using Social Media have organized a communication network reporting daily on the dangerous zones of their cities. How did it start and how effective are they? In this presentation Andrés Monroy-Hernández [...]

Listen: or download | …also in Ogg Nobel Laureate and Economist Elinor Ostrom passed away last month at the age of 78. Best recognized for her research into the management of common pool resources, Ostrom broke new ground with her findings that Commons were not inherently tragic, as previous generations of economists believed. In fact, [...]

In this presentation, Rosemarie Garland-Thomson — Professor of Women’s Studies and English at Emory University and fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University — expands the idea of accessible technology to show how the way we make our shared world of buildings, technologies, public spaces, practices, laws, and attitudes builds a [...]