Governmental Deliberations on Exemptions to the DMCA’s Ban on Circumvention
by Nicholas Bramble | July 26, 2010 | DMCA, copyright, user rights | No Comments
Today, following a rulemaking proceeding required by the Digital Millennium Copyright Act and administered by the U.S. Copyright Office, the Librarian of Congress announced six classes of works that would be exempt from the DMCA’s general ban on circumvention of technological measures that control access to copyrighted works.
Related to this rulemaking, here’s a fascinating take from the Copyright Office and Library of Congress on how they analyzed the evidence in the record and resolved competing fair use and policy claims relating to the new DMCA circumvention exceptions: http://www.copyright.gov/1201/2010/RM-2008-8.pdf. (Side note: The notice will be entered into the federal register tomorrow, and I hope that it will be up on the new federalregister.gov site as well, in an easier-to-read format!)
The notice, which is really worth reading in full, addresses (or at least hints at) the following questions, among many others:
Why is it that only college students/professors, and not K-12 students/teachers, are permitted to circumvent CSS to access DVD content? Why is this exception targeted chiefly towards criticism and commentary, given that a variety of other activities such as news reporting, teaching, scholarship, and research have typically been understood to be within the domain of fair use? (page 3)
Why is it permissible under fair use to jailbreak an iPhone in order to add applications to it, and why are Apple’s and NTIA’s arguments against fair use unpersuasive? (pages 4-5)
Why is it permissible for both non-profit entities and (some) commercial users to use software or firmware to retrofit old phones to connect to wireless telecom networks, and why is NTIA wrong in its argument that this exception should be limited to non-profit entities? (pages 6-7)
Why is a DMCA exception necessary to support research into security vulnerabilities of PC games, but not digital books, music, and movies? (pages 7-8)
When does a person gain the right to use self-help to circumvent an “obsolete” dongle (based either in a printer or USB port) that controls access to software? (page 9)
What proposed exceptions did the Register of Copyrights and the Librarian of Congress both decide to reject, and why? (pages 9-13)
How has copyright law failed to protect the interests of blind and print-disabled people in the digital age? Why has the Librarian of Congress rejected the arguments of the Register of Copyrights that the American Federation for the Blind failed to clear all the procedural hurdles necessary to justify a DMCA exception for read-aloud and text-rendering software circumventions? (page 14)
Overall, quite an interesting read—perhaps all the more so because it comes from a set of sources that occupy an often-overlooked place in the interpretation of copyright law.
MFIA Wins Appeal Seeking Access to Sealed Records
by Perry Fetterman | July 26, 2010 | Uncategorized | No Comments
Yale Law School’s Media Freedom and Information Access (MFIA) Practicum scored another victory when a New York state appellate court ruled unanimously that documents in a civil lawsuit alleging corporate corruption were improperly sealed, and clarified the scope of the constitutional access right in the New York courts. Congratulations to Patrick Kabat and the MFIA team for this important win.
For more information, please see the following press release: http://www.law.yale.edu/news/12077.htm
MFIA, an initiative of the Yale Information Society Project and the Knight Law & Media Program at Yale Law School, was founded by Yale Law School students to defend the public’s right of access to government information and to support traditional and emerging forms of newsgathering. Through MFIA, Yale Law students work under the supervision of veteran media attorneys who volunteer their time pro bono on cases where private actors lack the resources to prosecute the public’s access rights. More information about MFIA follows:
- About MFIA – http://www.law.yale.edu/intellectuallife/11200.htm
- MFIA Files Amicus Urging Protection of Anonymous Online Critic – http://www.law.yale.edu/intellectuallife/11453.htm
- MFIA Files Appellate Brief on behalf of Journalist Denied Access to Court Records – http://www.law.yale.edu/intellectuallife/11466.htm
Innovate/Activate Unconference on September 24-25
by Laura DeNardis | July 21, 2010 | announcements, conference, events | No Comments
Save the date for Innovate/Activate: An Unconference on Intellectual Property and Activism, scheduled for September 24-25, 2010 at New York Law School. Special thanks to Chris Wong for his efforts organizing this interesting event, presented by the Institute for Information Law & Policy at New York Law School and co-organized by the Information Society Project at Yale Law School. 
Bilski & the Definition of Things That “Are Free for All to Use”
by Nicholas Bramble | June 28, 2010 | cases, patents, supreme court | 2 Comments
Amazon 1-Click Patent: more likely to survive after today's ruling in Bilski?
The Supreme Court today issued its long-anticipated opinion in the Bilski patent case, regarding a rejected application for patent protection over a method for hedging against the risk of price changes in the energy market. Hot off the presses: http://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/09pdf/08-964.pdf.
And at first glance, this complex mix of opinions seems rather inconclusive. Basically, Justice Kennedy’s majority opinion—which was joined by Alito, Thomas, and Roberts in full, and Scalia in part—affirmed that the specific business method at issue in Bilski was not patentable. But Kennedy rejected any categorical rule saying that business methods in general could not be patentable processes. This conclusion was reached through a somewhat confusing attempt to read out a plain-language definition of “process” based on the different uses of this term in the Patent Act, and then a rejection of the Bilski patent on the separate grounds that it was too abstract to be patentable.
In contrast, Justice Stevens’ much longer concurrence would create a categorical prohibition on business method patents: “Methods of doing business are not, in themselves, covered by the [Patent Act].” Stevens suggests that both the USPTO respondent and the Kennedy majority failed to develop a successful overarching definition of the word “process,” despite their attempts to reconcile the various appearances of the word in the Patent Act. Stevens argues that the Patent Act simply has too “many moving parts” to be amenable to the government’s attempt to define “process” solely by how it is used in one section of the Act. On the other hand, Stevens rejects the majority’s attempt to derive an expansive plain-text understanding of the word “process.” He argues that “posit[ing] that the word ‘process’ must be understood in light of its ‘ordinary, contemporary, common meaning’ . . . is a deeply flawed approach to a statute that relies on complex terms of art developed against a particular historical background.” As a result, Stevens spends much of the rest of his concurrence reviewing the history of patent law, which he concludes “yields a much more straightforward answer to this case.”
Finally, a short concurrence by Breyer and Scalia (Part II) seems, theoretically at least, to hedge towards Justice Stevens’ idea of creating categorical conceptions of “certain things [that] are free for all to use.” It looks as if Scalia was the likely swing vote in this case, but wasn’t fully satisfied with either Kennedy’s or Stevens’ opinion. This concurrence pushes more heavily on the “machine or transformation” test downplayed by the majority opinion, and emphasizes both “the restrictive effect of the limited patent monopoly” and the costs of patents on “the public’s access to the basic tools of scientific and technological work.”
It’s similarly notable that Kennedy (in the majority opinion) succinctly describes an essential tension in the innovation incentives that patent law tries to foster: “The Information Age . . . puts the possibility of innovation in the hands of more people and raises new difficulties for the patent law. With ever more people trying to innovate and thus seeking patent protections for their inventions, the patent law faces a great challenge in striking the balance between protecting inventors and not granting monopolies over procedures that others would discover by independent, creative application of general principles.”
Still, for all the theoretical work being done in this set of opinions, it’s hard to state with clarity what rule ultimately emerges from these general principles and dicta, and what the continued relevance of the “machine or transformation” test might be. For instance, in the sentence after his description of patent law’s “great challenge,” Justice Kennedy notes that the Court in Bilski has not actually addressed this policy question: “Nothing in this opinion should be read to take a position on where that balance ought to be struck.” As a result, I’m initially tempted to agree with some others that this is an instance of the Court punting on a set of difficult questions in an area where the clear judicial articulation of a rule might have been helpful to innovators, lower courts, and the legislative process. In the absence of a categorical rule, we will instead continue to rely on case-by-case patentability determinations regarding the scope of property rights in business methods, software, diagnostic tools, and other applications which downstream innovators hope to build upon and transform.
In some ways, Justice Kennedy’s reluctance to determine whether “software, advanced diagnostic medicine techniques, and inventions based on linear programming, data compression, and the manipulation of digital signals” should receive patent protection mirrors Justice Souter’s admonition in Denver Area that “we should be shy about saying the final word today about what will be accepted as reasonable tomorrow.” But it’s harder to maintain this position of judicial minimalism in a situation where the continuance of the status quo can so limit the scope of what can be built and transformed today, and thus also limit the scope of what has a chance to become accepted as “reasonable” tomorrow.
Illuminating the impact of intellectual property law on innovation
by Lea Shaver | June 11, 2010 | news and ideas | 4 Comments
Christina’s terrific piece on Copyright and Glee looks at IP law’s impact on cultural participation. But what about the impact of IP on access to new technologies?
I’d like to take that up as the topic of my post, through a look at the little-known legal life of the light bulb.
Thanks to Zetson for the CC-licensed image, via Flickr
More than a century after its introduction, the light bulb remains the defining icon of invention.
Justifiably so, in my opinion, because this widget almost single-handedly drove the demand for electrification. The light bulb was the killer app, if you will, for electric power. Which in turn enabled a whole new era of innovation.
But the story I want to tell is not one of great inventors and the inevitable march of progress. Hardly. It’s a story of legal battles, corporate strategy, social (in)justice, and lost technological opportunities.
“Will the RIAA Sue Me?”: Resources for Glee Fans
by Christina Mulligan | June 11, 2010 | copyright | 1 Comment
As they say in the Starship Troopers movie, “Would you like to know more?” Glee highlights important issues in copyright law. So, if you’re interested in making mash-ups or posting videos on youtube and similar sites, what should you know? What resources are available to help you figure out what to do?
The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) has written a thorough guide to help creative individuals navigate the issues surrounding posting videos and what to do if youtube takes down your video. For the more visually inclined, you can also watch this video about disputing takedowns, made after the Hitler downfall parody takedown controversy.
For those looking to read more about the mash-up and remixing culture Glee celebrates, Lawrence Lessig’s Free Culture and Remix delve deeply into the issues with fascinating examples and a serious but accessible analysis of the law.
Finally, if you’re an artist who wants to allow others to use your work more freely, you can license your work under a creative commons license. There are several different licenses available that give the public varying degrees of freedom to use your work.
bringing fair use back into the copyright circus
by Nicholas Bramble | June 9, 2010 | Uncategorized | Comments Off
Just as a quick follow-up to Christina’s excellent (and now widely linked!) post examining how the characters of Glee might fare in the real world of copyright law, I wanted to stake out another set of reasons as to why one might find the situation she describes so troubling. It has to do with the intuition that teachers and students who use copyrighted materials in the course of education should be, as one commenter put it, “exempt from obtaining copyrights for performance.”
If you read the fair use statute, you might think that the copyright law’s framers shared this intuition:
“[T]he fair use of a copyrighted work … for purposes such as criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching (including multiple copies for classroom use), scholarship, or research, is not an infringement of copyright. In determining whether the use made of a work in any particular case is a fair use the factors to be considered shall include— (1) the purpose and character of the use, including whether such use is of a commercial nature or is for nonprofit educational purposes; …”
Perhaps those who access and transform copyrighted materials in the course of educating themselves—and in the course of educating others—are engaged in use that is fundamentally and categorically fair? Even if you don’t interpret the first sentence above to set forth a definitive list of fair use activities, it’s clear that Congress sought to carve out a strong exemption from liability for educational uses of copyrighted works. Based on the fair use statute, it looks as if the question of whether a use occurs in the context of teaching, scholarship, research, or education should be a threshold question, rather than merely one single factor in a broader inquiry. Indeed, Congress later affirmed in Section 110 that the “performance or display of a work by instructors or pupils in the course of face-to-face teaching activities of a nonprofit educational institution, in a classroom or similar place devoted to instruction” is not infringement.
So, then, what’s the worry for glee clubs? Or for that matter, what’s the worry for students who design a wiki around an in-copyright novel; edit that wiki by adding passages from the novel, images from film adaptations of the novel, and excerpts from critical reviews; display their work at an achievement fair; offer the wiki to a teacher who proceeds to share the project with future students studying the work in question; and make the wiki available as an open educational resource to students in other locations?
In brief, the worry has less to do with the text of copyright law, which seems to carve a wide swath of fair educational use, and more to do with the ambiguous ways in which this law has been interpreted. Judges sometimes evaluate fair use claims in complex and unpredictable ways, and lawyers are able to inject ambiguity into categories like “educational purposes” & “face-to-face teaching activities.” As a result, almost every point along the chain of technological and individual actions described above is at least capable of being classified as an infringement of copyright, and thus capable of triggering a fine of up to $150,000 for each instance of infringement.
Let’s be optimistic and assume that there’s a 1% chance of a judge finding willful infringement and assessing the full damage award in each instance: that still represents $1500 worth of risk for each action. Is a school likely to assume this kind of liability? Or is the possibility, however remote, of a crippling damages award going to serve as a fairly strong deterrent for any student or educator considering bringing cultural artifacts or experiences into the learning environment?
Many student projects already require the use and integration of copyrighted content, not to mention the frequent back-and-forth distribution of the projects and software containing this content, both for purposes of collaboration and student evaluation. The formalization of a clear and broad fair use interpretation for the classroom context would dispel the institutional fear and uncertainty surrounding these actions, and would free students and teachers to spend more time exploring, understanding, and recontextualizing materials within a newly opened-up educational public domain. It would be faithful to the statutory text of the Copyright Act. And it would permit us, once again, to conceive of fair use “not as a disorderly basket of exceptions to the rules of copyright, nor as a departure from the principles governing that body of law, but rather as a rational, integral part of copyright, whose observance is necessary to achieve the objectives of that law.”
Copyright: The Elephant in the Middle of the Glee Club
by Christina Mulligan | June 7, 2010 | copyright, opinion | 40 Comments
This Tuesday, millions of eyes will be glued to the season finale of Glee — a popular musical comedy airing on Fox. Excitement is building among the show’s viewership, but my own enthusiasm for Glee has recently given way to confusion over its message.
The fictional high school chorus at the center of the show has a huge problem, you see — nearly a million dollars in potential legal liability. For a show that regularly tackles thorny issues like teen pregnancy and alcohol abuse, it’s surprising that a million dollars worth of lawbreaking would go unmentioned. But it does, and week after week, those zany Glee kids rack up the potential to pay higher and higher fines.
In one recent episode, the AV Club helps cheerleading coach Sue Sylvester film a near-exact copy of Madonna’s Vogue music video (the real-life fine for copying Madonna’s original? up to $150,000). Just a few episodes later, a video of Sue dancing to Olivia Newton-John’s 1981 hit Physical is posted online (damages for recording the entirety of Physical on Sue’s camcorder: up to $300,000). And let’s not forget the glee club’s many mash-ups — songs created by mixing together two other musical pieces. Each mash-up is a “preparation of a derivative work” of the original two songs’ compositions – an action for which there is no compulsory license available, meaning (in plain English) that if the Glee kids were a real group of teenagers, they could not feasibly ask for — or hope to get — the copyright permissions they would need to make their songs, and their actions, legal under copyright law. Punishment for making each mash-up? Up to another $150,000 — times two.
The absence of any mention of copyright law in Glee illustrates a painful tension in American culture. While copyright holders assert that copyright violators are “stealing” their “property,” people everywhere are remixing and recreating artistic works for the very same reasons the Glee kids do — to learn about themselves, to become better musicians, to build relationships with friends, and to pay homage to the artists who came before them. Glee’s protagonists — and the writers who created them — see so little wrong with this behavior that the word ‘copyright’ is never even uttered.
You might be tempted to assume that this tension isn’t a big deal because copyright holders won’t go after creative kids or amateurs. But they do: In the 1990s, the American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers (ASCAP) asked members of the American Camping Association, including Girl Scout troops, to pay royalties for singing copyrighted songs at camp. In 2004, the Beatles’ copyright holders tried to prevent the release of The Grey Album – a mash-up of Jay-Z’s Black Album and the Beatles’ White Album — and only gave up after massive civil disobedience resulted in the album’s widespread distribution. Copyright holders even routinely demand that YouTube remove videos of kids dancing to popular music. While few copyright cases go to trial, copyright holders like the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) don’t hesitate to seek stratospheric damage awards when they do, as in the Jammie Thomas-Rasset filesharing case.
These worlds don’t match. Both Glee and the RIAA can’t be right. It’s hard to imagine glee club coach Will Schuester giving his students a tough speech on how they can’t do mash-ups anymore because of copyright law (but if he did, it might make people rethink the law). Instead, copyright violations are rewarded in Glee — after Sue’s Physical video goes viral, Olivia Newton-John contacts Sue so they can film a new, improved video together.
So what should you do in real life if you and your friends, inspired by Glee, want to make a mash-up, or a new music video for a popular song? Should you just leave this creativity to the professionals, or should you become dirty, rotten copyright violators?
Current law favors copyright holders. But morally, there’s nothing wrong with singing your heart out. Remixing isn’t stealing, and copyright isn’t property. Copyright is a privilege — actually six specific privileges — granted by the government. Back in 1834, the Supreme Court decided in Wheaton v. Peters that copyrights weren’t “property” in the traditional sense of the word, but rather entitlements the government chose to create for instrumental reasons. The scope and nature of copyright protection are policy choices — choices that have grown to favor the interests of established, rent-seeking businesses instead of the public in general.
The Constitution allows Congress to pass copyright laws to “promote the progress of science” — a word often used in the 18th century to mean “knowledge”. The stated purpose of the original 1790 copyright statute was to encourage learning. So you tell me — what promotes knowledge and learning: letting people rearrange music and learn to use a video camera, or threatening new artists with $150,000 fines?
Defenders of modern copyright law will argue Congress has struck “the right balance” between copyright holders’ interests and the public good. They’ll suggest the current law is an appropriate compromise among interest groups. But by claiming the law strikes “the right balance,” what they’re really saying is that the Glee kids deserve to be on the losing side of a lawsuit. Does that sound like the right balance to you?
Yale ISP at Global Internet Governance Scholars’ Workshop
by Perry Fetterman | May 27, 2010 | conference, events | Comments Off
Yale ISP Executive Director Dr. Laura DeNardis is presenting this weekend at the Third International Workshop on Global Internet Governance at McGill University in Montreal (QC) Canada. The workshop is being organized by the Global Internet Governance Academic Network (GigaNet), a scholarly community founded in spring of 2006 in conjunction with the United Nations Internet Governance Forum to:
*support the establishment of a global network of scholars specializing in Internet Governance issues;
*promote the development of Internet governance as a recognized, interdisciplinary field of study;
*advance theoretical and applied research on Internet governance, broadly defined, and;
*facilitate informed dialogue on policy issues and related matters between scholars and Internet governance stakeholders (governments, international organizations, the private sector, and civil society).
DeNardis, a member of GigaNet since its inception, will present on the opening panel about “What is Internet Governance research and what do different academic disciplines contribute to it?” DeNardis will discuss the study of Internet governance from the methodological and theoretical perspectives of the field of Science and Technology Studies (STS).
Open Video, WebM, and Patents
by Nicholas Bramble | May 19, 2010 | standards, video | Comments Off
Google (with support from Mozilla, Opera, and others) announced today that they’ll be freely—as in beer & as in speech—licensing their VP8 video compression technology, as part of developing “a high-quality, open video format for the web that is freely available to everyone.” Seems like excellent news insofar as this royalty-free format will continue to lower entry barriers to making and distributing web video.
There are two other main browser makers: Microsoft and Apple. Apple has not yet formally responded to Google’s VP8/WebM announcement, but it’s likely that their eventual response will be a complicated one, considering that Apple has structured much of its video ecosystem around the competing (and relatively proprietary) H.264 format, but also currently features a YouTube application on a number of its mobile devices.
Microsoft, on the other hand, appears to be both tacitly embracing and hedging against WebM. The Internet Explorer project manager writes that “when it comes to HTML5, we’re all in.” But Microsoft also notes that “some web groups have cited concerns about patent issues with similar codecs and the costs that may be associated with shipping codecs not covered by patent licenses.” And even if a successful patent lawsuit against WebM is less likely than one against Ogg, Microsoft seems unwilling, at least for now, to give the same default & native support to WebM/VP8 that it gives to H264. Thus “IE9 will support playback of H.264 video as well as VP8 video when the user has installed a VP8 codec on Windows.” In other words, the burden is on the user, not the browser maker, to install the WebM codec. Easy for users to do on desktops, perhaps (if the user has install privileges), but not so easy on mobile devices!
In general, this Ars Technica article (+ comments) spins out numerous different ways in which these patent questions might play out. Perhaps the lack of initial straightforward support from other browser makers shouldn’t be surprising, since most companies aren’t exactly willing to do awesome things first and hope the patent/copyright questions will eventually fall into place. But it will certainly be interesting to see what alliances are ultimately struck; whether the adoption of a free and open video standard will significantly shift the landscape of web video; and whether in the future we’ll have more, or fewer, points of transaction/control between video makers and users.
Harvard-MIT-Yale Cyberscholar Working Group May 5
by Perry Fetterman | May 4, 2010 | events | Comments Off
The next Harvard-MIT-Yale Cyberscholars Working Group will take place on Wednesday, May 5, 6:00 pm – 8:30 pm in Conference Room 202 at the Berkman Center, located at 23 Everett St 2nd Floor, Cambridge, MA. Jeffrey Warren will talk about “Grassroots Mapping Projects”; Nicholas Bramble will discuss “A Diverse and Antagonistic Information Age?”; and David Abrams will present on “YouTube’s Copyright Downfall.” Please RSVP to Herkko Hietanen at hietanen@cyber.law.harvard.edu.
Jeffrey Warren: Grassroots Mapping Projects
Jeffrey Warren will present the Grassroots Mapping Project and Cartagen, a set of tools for mapping, enabling users to view and configure live streams of geographic data in a dynamic, personally relevant way. These tools helps users to analyze and view collected and shared geographic and temporal data from multiple sources. The framework uses vector-based, context-sensitive drawing methods to describe data, not merely in terms of lines and polygons, but also with adaptive use of color, movement, and projection. Applications include mapping real-time air pollution, citizen reporting, and disaster response.
Nicholas Bramble: A Diverse and Antagonistic Information Age?
The First Amendment “rests on the assumption that the widest possible dissemination of information from diverse and antagonistic sources is essential to the welfare of the public.” AP v. US, 326 U.S. 1, 20 (1945). This principle of “diverse and antagonistic sources,” which will turn 65 years old in June, has become one of the most frequently cited and axiomatic Supreme Court statements in cases regarding media regulation. My talk examines the compatibility of traditional conceptions of the First Amendment with new and unexpected mechanisms for representing and promoting the public’s interest in “diversity of political discourse, unique opportunities for cultural development, and myriad avenues for intellectual activity.” I am interested both in the government’s role in setting up safe harbors along the lines of DMCA § 512 and CDA § 230—which seem to represent a shift from disseminating information to promoting the cultivation and agricultural stewardship of information and applications from distributed sources—and the possibility of treating platforms such as the social graph as basic infrastructure. However, if these safe harbors and other related regulations are premised on a layers-based architecture where the underlying layers of a network are conduits for user-driven communications and applications, then what happens when both users and network/platform providers assert speech rights in the network? How do we assess the relative speech and information value of these competing First Amendment claims, and how should we balance public and private regulatory tools in shaping the open-ended infrastructure of the Internet?
David Abrams: YouTube’s Copyright Downfall
David Abrams has analysed at ChillingEffects.Org the problems associated with the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) takedown procedures at the margins of fair use and over-inclusive takedowns caused by automated copyright management systems. In particular David is interested in how the DMCA can be tweaked to encourage copyright holders to tend toward under-inclusiveness rather than over-inclusiveness at these margins. David discusses some of the policies and technology that YouTube has for managing copyright infringements based on recent takedowns and information contained in the summary judgment motions from the Viacom v. YouTube trial.
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Jeff Warren designs mapping tools and visual environments in the Design Ecology group of the MIT Media Lab and is a fellow at the Center for Future Civic Media at MIT. He created Cartagen, an open- source system for reporting and displaying geodata in real time. http://unterbahn.com/ http://grassrootsmapping.org/ http://cartagen.org/
Nicholas Bramble is a postdoctoral fellow in law at Yale Law School and a resident fellow at the Yale Information Society Project.
David Abrams received bachelors and masters degrees in electrical engineering from MIT. He spent 10 years designing instrumentation before co-founding a software company in 1988. He and his partners sold the company in 2001 and David left in 2002 to go to law school. After graduating from Harvard Law School in 2005, David worked as an Intellectual Property litigator before spending three years clerking for Judge Zobel. In 2008 he returned to Harvard Law Schoolas as program director for the new problem solving course and as a fellow at the Berkman Center. More Chilling than the DMCA – Automated Takedowns: http://www.chillingeffects.org/weather.cgi?WeatherID=634
Beth Noveck on Open Government April 23
by Laura DeNardis | April 20, 2010 | ISP speaker series, events, first amendment | Comments Off
You are cordially invited to a special Information Society Project lunch speaker series featuring Beth Noveck discussing “Open Government and the First Amendment: Strengthening our Democracy through Transparency, Participation, and Collaboration” on Friday, April 23 at 12:15 p.m. in Room 128 of Yale Law School. This event is part of the Liberty Tree First Amendment Online Colloquium, sponsored by the Liberty Tree Initiative, the McCormick Foundation, and the First Amendment Center.
Beth Noveck is a Founding Fellow of the Information Society Project at Yale Law School, the United States Deputy Chief Technology Officer for open government and head of the United States Open Government Initiative, and a Professor of Law (on leave) and Director of the Institute for Information Law and Policy at New York Law School. She is a magna cum laude graduate of Harvard University and a 1997 graduate of Yale Law School.
Please don’t miss this opportunity to attend a special event and ISP Reunion with Beth Noveck.
Panel on States, Markets, and Inequality in Reprogenetics
by Laura DeNardis | April 18, 2010 | ISP speaker series, events | Comments Off
Please join us on April 23 at 3:00 p.m. for a special Information Society Project panel exploring some of the challenges to traditional reproductive rights arguments that are posed by the availability of new reproductive technologies. Entitled, Power Plays: States, Markets, and Inequality in Reprogenetics, the panel will be moderated by ISP Senior Fellow Priscilla Smith and will feature presentations by:
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Recent Posts
- Governmental Deliberations on Exemptions to the DMCA’s Ban on Circumvention
- MFIA Wins Appeal Seeking Access to Sealed Records
- Innovate/Activate Unconference on September 24-25
- Bilski & the Definition of Things That “Are Free for All to Use”
- Illuminating the impact of intellectual property law on innovation