Center for Internet and Society

Wired News/Circuit Court: The Internet's War of the Roses. About the Speaker: Jennifer Stisa Granick, Executive Director, Center for Internet and Society and Lecturer in Law, Stanford Law School

In the controversy over file sharing the perspective of music makers is often overlooked. Loudest are the voices of copyright holders and industry representatives, their lawyers and politicians. For the vast majority of musicians, however, the current regime is neither just nor practical. Its inherent contradictions have been starkly revealed by digital technology but those contradictions have been there all along. This talk will bring the perspective of the music maker (inclusive of musicians, composers, sound engineers and instrument builders) to a discussion of three crucial questions: 1. Public Domain, traditional music and the protection of music composed by no one., 2. the abolition of copyright and its replacement by accurate credit and just compensation, 3. internet downloading, audience building and the creation of value. About the Speaker: Mat Callahan has been involved in the music industry for over 30 years. He was the founder of the legendary San Francisco performance space/recording studio/magazine Komotion International, and was a founding member of Island recording aritsts The Looters. He has worked as an engineer, manager and producer.

With the growth of the Internet as a tool of free speech, hate speech remains a challenging issue. The breadth of issues attendant to regulating and addressing hate speech on the Internet is seen by considering a number of questions. Should universities ban hate speech on their networks? Should libraries install filters to protect children? Should your Internet Service Provider remove harmful posts? These and other thought-provoking subjects will be discussed, with a unique opportunity to ask questions of two experts in this area. About the Speakers: Ann Brick is a Staff Attorney with the ACLU of Northern California. Steven M. Freeman is the Associate Director, Civil Rights Division, and Director of the Legal Affairs Department of the Anti-Defamation League.

What if copyright really isn't about copying at all? What happens to the concept of copyright if you take the "copy" out of it? What you're left with is particular forms of control over the distribution of information. And, perhaps, a better way of understanding and reconciling other forms of information law such as freedom of the press and telecommunications regulation. About the Speaker: Ernest Miller pursues research and writing on cyberlaw, intellectual property, and First Amendment issues. Mr. Miller attended the U.S. Naval Academy before attending Yale Law School, where he was president and co-founder of the Law and Technology Society, and founded the technology law and policy news site LawMeme.

Starting in June 2003, Julian Dibbell spent 9 months trying to make a living buying and selling virtual items (swords, castles, gold pieces) from the online fairytale world Ultima Online, a massively multiplayer role-playing game. His experience illuminates a strange new parallel world and the changing relationship between value and reality in the postpostmodern economy. About the Speaker: Julian Dibbell is the author of two books on virtual worlds, My Tiny Life (Henry Holt, 1999) and the forthcoming Play Money (Basic, 2006), and has written essays and articles on hackers, computer viruses, online communities, encryption technologies, music pirates, and other digital-age phenomena together. Currently a contributing editor for Wired magazine, he lives in South Bend, Indiana.

Wired News/Circuit Court: Lie Detectors. About the Speaker: Jennifer Stisa Granick, Executive Director, Center for Internet and Society and Lecturer in Law, Stanford Law School

The talk will outline Benkler's argument that social production is reshaping the production of information and culture, offering new challenges and opportunities to market actors in the networked environment, while creating opportunities to enhance individual freedom, cultural diversity, political discourse, and justice. These results are by no means inevitable, however. A systematic campaign to protect the entrenched industrial information economy of the last century threatens the promise of today's emerging networked information environment. About the Speaker: Yochai Benkler is professor of law at Yale and author of The Wealth of Networks: How Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedom (Yale University Press March-April 2006).

Environmentalists have a complicated relationship with property rights. Those who worry about the physical environment often decry strong property rights that threaten to derail environmental regulation. But environmentalists have also harnessed property rights to preserve important habitats and open spaces, using voluntary, property-based mechanisms like conservation easements to block land development. Similarly, those concerned with cultivating a cultural environment in which creative works contribute to new generations of creativity often criticize strong intellectual property rights that threaten to impoverish the public domain. But cultural environmentalists have also harnessed intellectual property rights in an attempt to create and preserve a cultural commons, using voluntary, intellectual property-based mechanisms like Free Software and Creative Commons licenses. This paper will explore the advantages and disadvantages of using voluntary manipulation of intellectual property rights as a tool for cultural environmentalism-drawing on the experience of the conservation movement, and on scholarship and case law debating the merits of encumbering assets with idiosyncratic property rights. About the Speaker: Molly Shaffer Van Houweling joined the Boalt faculty in fall 2005 from the University of Michigan Law School, where she had been an assistant professor since 2002. Van Houweling's teaching and research interests include intellectual property, law and technology, property, and constitutional law. She was a visiting professor at Boalt in 2004-05.

"Law makes long spokes of the short stakes of man," William Empson reminded us. This paper will explore the ways in which the law's impulse to generalize complicates the project of cultural environmentalism, which seeks to build a coalition of groups with very different interests and practices. Though cultural environmentalism attempts to provide an overarching metaphor for preserving a cultural commons for future creators and users of various types of information products, including copyrighted works, the move from the general principle to the specific activities to be protected will be difficult at best. About the Speaker: Rebecca Tushnet is an assistant professor at the New York University School of Law (visiting Georgetown, 2004-2005).

In current debates about a "two-tiered internet," the romantic figure of the "network builder" is being used to end the arguments about desirable social policy that otherwise should occur. If only we had a more natural name for this network of networks than the internet; if only more people understood it to be a deeply human endeavor whose value comes from all of us; if only it were more visible as a social, self-reflected, self-entailed world that happens to be connected by machines. The internet needs a lobbyist. More importantly, however, it needs a new social theory. The theory that will see us through focuses on the meaning and liveliness of "the network" (the name for all the layers of the internet above the transport layer). This network is a commons, like the ocean. The vast majority of its value emphatically does not come from the access providers who now claim to "own" it. Instead, its value comes from the gifts and interactions and attention of the people who use it and whose minds it reflects. The central paradox of networks generally is that they are more than the sum of their parts; this network, the internet, is exponentially more than the sum of access plus computers because it allows and generates unpredictable interactions among groups. Once we reframe our theoretical approach to this network, we can move on to assert that access to it, like access to the oceans of this Earth, is essential to human flourishing. And our government has a duty to protect this access. What the telcos/cablecos have is beachfront property, over which access to the sea - the internet - will be required by the public at whatever speed is widely commercially available. Such access will make it possible for humans to use and contribute to this resource into the future, always in unpredictable ways. If the telcos/cablecos degrade internet communications by slowing the rate at which humans can add to the value of this resource (the rate at which we can upload, rather than passively download) and degrading our access to the contributions of others and the global mind that the internet represents, we may have to assert that there is a public interest in access that is greater than protecting these companies' property rights. About the Speaker: Susan Crawford is Assistant Professor of Law at Cardozo Law School, teaching cyberlaw and telecommunications law.

James Boyle's "cultural environmentalism" metaphor laid the foundation for the recognition and protection of traditional knowledge and natural resources found in the developing world. The theory underlying the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) was that while traditional communities may not have invented knowledge about the medicinal properties of local plants, they ought to be rewarded nonetheless for their preservation and conservation of biodiversity through limited rights to control and compensation. Taking a cue from the environmental justice movement, which demonstrated the disparate effects of environmental harms on disadvantaged minorities, the cultural environmental movement illustrated how Third World peoples are disproportionately disadvantaged by intellectual property law, which historically has not recognized their cultural contributions as protectable works of authorship. But while this paper credits "cultural environmentalism" with offering theoretical legitimacy for traditional knowledge protection, it further considers whether the metaphor may also disable a more dynamic and modern view of traditional knowledge. In fact, traditional knowledge is far from static and archaic and much more dynamic than the "environmentalism" metaphor acknowledges. The makers of Mysore silk sarees in India respond to new market, technological, and cultural needs, for example, offering waterproof sarees in hi-tech designs to today's global consumers. I consider how the "environmentalism" metaphor may impede an understanding of "poor people's knowledge" (a term I prefer to "traditional knowledge") as creative works of authorship deserving of ex ante intellectual property rights rather than just as rights afforded ex post to reward preservation of ancient traditions or to correct longstanding cultural and distributive injustice. About the Speaker: Professor Sunder is a leading scholar in the legal regulation of culture. Her work traverses numerous legal fields, from intellectual property and cultural property to human rights law and the First Amendment. She asks how age-old legal doctrines impede, rather than facilitate, change and modernity within traditional cultures. Adopting an interdisciplinary method, she argues that cultural studies and globalization studies can help us to modernize antiquated laws for the 21st century.

Human rights atrocities that occur on a massive scale are often the result of deliberate policy, and international legal accountability requires that we prove not only that abuses occurred, but that violence was the deliberately planned. Statistical patterns in the violations may provide evidence of policy, but finding these patterns requires a creative use of data and models. This talk will review the use of data ranging from official border registries to cemeteries, declassified documents, and qualitative victim interviews, each analyzed by a wide range of techniques. Examples will be presented from El Salvador, Guatemala, Kosovo, Timor-Leste, and Chad. About the Speaker: Patrick Ball, Ph.D., is the Director of Human Rights Programs at the Benetech Initiative. Since 1991, he has designed information management systems and conducted quantitative analysis for large-scale human rights data projects for seven truth commissions, many non-governmental organizations, two tribunals and various United Nations missions in El Salvador, Ethiopia, Guatemala, Haiti, South Africa, Kosovo, Sierra Leone, Sri Lanka, Peru, Chad, Sri Lanka, Colombia, Timor-Leste, and others.

Computer technologies that I collect under the heading "social software" increase the salience of informal groups. Their salience raises important questions about both the significance and the benefits of informal groups. I organize analysis of those questions around the concept of governance, and the concept of information governance in particular. About the Speaker: Michael J. Madison is Associate Dean for Research and Associate Professor of Law at the University of Pittsburgh School of Law, where he specializes in copyright law, the law of intellectual property, the Internet, and electronic commerce. He was previously the Director of Pitt's Certificate Program in Intellectual Property and Technology Law.

Sony's latest Digital Rights Management (DRM)-endeavour earned a charge of "fraud, false advertising, trespass and the violation of state and federal statutes prohibiting malware, and unauthorized computer tampering". The technology installs, unnoticed by the user, a piece of software that prevents consumers from unauthorised copying, is able to monitor and report user behaviour back to the firm and, accidentally, holds the door wide open for Trojans. Under other circumstances one would be tempted to describe such a strategy a hostile "spy at-tack". In case of Sony BMG, this seems to be part of a business model to sell digital music to consumers. The talk will have a closer look at the charges of the EFF and a Californian lawyer against Sony BMG's latest DRM strategy. The Sony BMG case adds a number of interesting new dimensions to the 'DRM and Consumer' debate. The talk will explain why the case is so important, also against the background of similar recent case law in Europe, and why it points into an entirely new direction of talking about DRM. About the Speaker: Natali Helberger is Associate Professor at the Institute for Information Law, University of Amsterdam. Dr. Helberger is managing legal partner to the INDICARE project. INDICARE (Informed Dialogue about Consumer Acceptability of Rights Management Solutions in Europe) is a project co-funded by the European Commission. The objective of INDICARE is to address issues regarding consumer acceptability of digital rights management solutions; identify obstacles and suggest solutions. At the moment, she is a visiting scholar at the University of California, Berkeley.