Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society: Audio Fishbowl

Again and again there have been attempts to police music; to restrict borrowing and cultural cross-fertilization. But music builds on itself. To those who think that mash-ups and sampling started with YouTube or the DJ’s turntables, it might be shocking to find that musicians have been borrowing — extensively borrowing — from each other since music began. Then why try to stop that process? The reasons varied. Philosophy, religion, politics, race — again and again, race — and law. And because music affects us so deeply, those struggles were passionate ones. They still are. Professors James Boyle and Jennifer Jenkins (Duke Law School) discuss Theft! A History of Music, their graphic novel about musical borrowing. Learn more about this event here: https://cyber.harvard.edu/events/2018/luncheon/04/Boyle

“Cheap speech” has massively increased ordinary people’s access to mass communications — both for good and for ill. How has the system of remedies for defamatory, privacy-invading, and harassing speech reacted? Some ways are predictable; some are surprising; some are shocking. Prof. Eugene Volokh (UCLA) lays it all out. Learn more about this event here: https://cyber.harvard.edu/events/2018/luncheon/04/Volokh

Who controls how one's identity is used by others? This legal question, centuries old, demands greater scrutiny in the Internet Age. Jennifer Rothman uses the right of publicity — a little-known law, often wielded by celebrities — to answer that question not just for the famous, but for everyone. For more on this event visit: https://cyber.harvard.edu/events/2018/luncheon/04/Rothman

The online world is no longer a distinct world. It is an extension of our social, economic, and political lives. Internet access, however, is still often considered a luxury good in the United States. Millions of Americans have been priced out of, or entirely excluded from, the reach of modern internet networks. Maria Smith, an affiliate of Berkman Klein and the Cyberlaw Clinic, created a four-part documentary series to highlight these stark divides in connectivity, from Appalachia to San Francisco, and to uncover the complex web of political and economic forces behind them. Learn more about this event here: https://cyber.harvard.edu/events/2018/luncheon/03/Smith

Algorithms for predicting recidivism are commonly used to assess a criminal defendant’s likelihood of committing a crime. Proponents of these systems argue that big data and advanced machine learning make these analyses more accurate and less biased than humans. In this talk researcher Julia Dressel discusses a recent study demonstrating that the widely used commercial risk assessment software COMPAS is no more accurate or fair than predictions made by people with little or no criminal justice expertise. Learn more about this event here: http://cyber.harvard.edu/events/2018/luncheon/03/Dressel

The Global Lives Project presents 24-hour-long videos of daily lives of individuals from around the world both online and through in-person exhibits. This 15-year project is an online and real-world collaboration between thousands of filmmakers, photographers, translators and everyday people from around the world. The project's latest exhibit, Lives in Transit, showcases unedited footage of the daily lives of transportation workers from around the world, including Vietnam, Nepal, Turkey, China, India, South Korea, Colombia, Spain and Canada Global Lives Project Founder David Evan Harris speaks about the evolution of the project, and its ambitious goal of connecting the diverse experiences of humanity around the globe, and building empathy. For more information on this event visit: https://cyber.harvard.edu/events/2018/luncheon/02/GlobalLivesProject

METRO/599 is a studio in Hell’s Kitchen that connects more than 250 of New York’s libraries, archives, and knowledge organizations. With 6,000 square feet of event and studio space, supporting projects in digital privacy, multimedia media archiving, metadata aggregation, and podcasting, and offering tools for everything from software preservation to signage prototyping to spaghetti and meatball crafting, METRO/599 is reinventing the multi-type library consortium as a metacommunity center. In this talk, Nate Hill, Executive Director of the Metropolitan New York Library Council, gives an overview of the programs at METRO/599, talks about the challenges associated with this organizational recalibration, seeks input and ideas from the group, and extends an invitation to attendees to come take part in the fun. For more information visit: https://cyber.harvard.edu/events/2018/luncheon/02/Hill

Health spending continues to outpace wages and GDP, while some new insurance designs transfer greater shares of that to patients’ own out of pocket costs. In this talk co-hosted with the Petrie-Flom Center for Health Law Policy, Biotechnology, and Bioethics at Harvard Law School, Dr. John Freedman, President & CEO of Freedman HealthCare discusses what is driving health care costs up, who is benefiting, and how data is harnessed to study problems and remedy them. More info on this event here: https://cyber.harvard.edu/events/2018/luncheon/02/Freedman

What is the role of libraries in a technological society? A group of librarians, technologists, journalists, and researchers, including new DPLA executive director John Bracken, come together to reflect on the Digital Public Library of America’s past, present and future, and explore the way in which libraries can contribute to a stronger civic life in the midst of disruptive times. Read more here: https://cyber.harvard.edu/node/100128 Learn more about the Digital Public Library of America: http://dp.la

In this talk, Berkman Klein affiliate Jonas Kaiser shares some of his research on the networked public sphere. "The right-wing is rising. Not only in the United States but also in Germany and other European countries. And the internet helped," he writes. "Right-wing actors are active all over the internet, adapt to platforms, game the system, blur the lines between off- and online, and create their own virtual spaces. In addition, social media platforms like YouTube contribute involuntarily to the right-wing's reach and, perhaps, influence with their algorithms." In this talk Kaiser will explore these issues and potential ways forward. More info on this event here: https://cyber.harvard.edu/events/2018/luncheon/01/Kaiser

The January 4, 2018 release of the Federal Communications Commission’s "Restoring Internet Freedom Order" marked the most recent turn of events in the longstanding and ever-changing debate over net neutrality. In this lively debate, Christopher S. Yoo (Founding Director of the Center for Technology, Innovation and Competition at the University of Pennsylvania) and Matt Wood (Policy Director of Free Press) explore the consequences of this action, including the implications of the Order, the outcome of the judicial challenge, and the possibility of legislative reform. More info on this event here: https://cyber.harvard.edu/events/2018/01/NetNeutrality

After a photographer left his camera equipment out for a group of wild macaques to explore, the monkeys took a series of photos, including selfies. Once the photos were posted publicly, legal disputes arose around who should own the copyrights — the human photographer who engineered the situation, or the macaques who snapped the photos. This unique case raises the increasingly pertinent question as to whether non-humans — whether they be monkeys or artificial intelligence machines — can claim copyrights to their creations. Jon Lovvorn, Lecturer on Law and the Policy Director of Harvard Law School's Animal Law & Policy Program, hosts a discussion panel featuring Jeff Kerr, the General Counsel of PETA, which sued on behalf of the monkey, and experts on copyright, cyber law, and intermediary liability issues, as well as Tiffany C. Li of Yale Law School’s Information Society Project, and Christopher T. Bavitz and Kendra Albert of Harvard Law School’s Cyberlaw Clinic. More info on this event here: https://cyber.harvard.edu/events/2018/luncheon/01/monkeyselfie

In this talk, Orly Lobel—award-winning author of Talent Wants to be Free and the Don Weckstein Professor of Law at the University of San Diego—delves into the legal disputes between toy powerhouses to expose the ways IP is used as a sledgehammer in today’s innovation battles. More info on this event here: https://cyber.harvard.edu/events/2018/luncheon/01/Lobel

Can diversity and free expression co-exist on our campuses? How about in our town squares, our cities, and our world? In this talk, John Palfrey — Head of School at Phillips Academy, Andover, and author of the new book "Safe Spaces, Braves Spaces" — leads a discussion of two of the foundational values of our democracy in the digital age. Learn more about this event, and watch the video here: https://cyber.harvard.edu/events/2017/10/Palfrey

Since the rise of the web in the 1990s, technological skeptics have always faced resistance. To question the virtue and righteousness of tech, and especially computing, was seen as truculence, ignorance, or luddism. But today, the real downsides of tech, from fake news to data breaches to AI-operated courtrooms to energy-sucking bitcoin mines, have become both undeniable and somewhat obvious in retrospect. In light of this new technological realism, perhaps there is appetite for new ways to think about and plan for the future of technology, which anticipates what might go right and wrong once unproven tech mainstreams quickly. In this conversation, author and an award-winning game designer Dr. Ian Bogost considers a technology that has not yet mainstreamed—autonomous vehicles—as a test case on how we should think about the future of tech. More info on this event here: https://cyber.harvard.edu/events/2017/luncheon/12/Bogost