Alien Infrastructures: Learning from Unusual Arrangements of Information and Communication Technology

Christian Sandvig

Pragmatically minded researchers often use “best practices” comparisons to study the design and organization of technological systems such as telephone networks, broadband providers, and platforms for computer-supported cooperative work.  While best practices are often useful, in complex interdependent systems that depend heavily on their context, dramatic and inspirational differences may be just as valuable as the imitation of commonalities.  This argues for research on best practices and also on strange practices.  In this research project we compile a literature of cases that are recognizable as information and communication systems, but due to one (or more) severe constraint they have evolved in a way that is noticeably strange.  By focusing on these constraints we develop a database of difference that includes shoe computers, pigeon networks, modern long-distance atmospheric optical networks, and Internet services optimized for semi-nomadic reindeer herders.  We use this corpus to assess our own expectations for technological systems of information and communication, and reflect on what a standpoint theory of infrastructure might look like.

Infrastructures of Imageability

Susanne Seitinger

Increasingly, urban environments are brightly illuminated by a combination of display and lighting technologies at nighttime. These systems fulfill different functions and are rarely designed together to enable a holistic lighting environment. Meanwhile, advances in LED technology and the miniaturization of embedded electronics are converging towards new types of addressable infrastructures that both provide light and convey content. Rather than understanding these systems separately, I suggest blurring the boundary between various “infrastructures of imageability” to rethink their social and aesthetic role in the city. I revisit the socio-technical origins of lighting and display to suggest some possible directions for alternative narratives of urban illumination.

Rural Development through Village Knowledge Centers in India

Ramesh Subramanian

For the past several years, India has experimented with extending the reach of ICTs to rural areas with a view to bringing development to these areas. This paper examines the implementation of Village knowledge Centers in rural Southern India. I first describe the developmental disparity that exists between urban and rural areas in India, and justify the implementation of rural projects that extend ICTs to rural areas. I examine prior work and then describe in detail the Village knowledge Center Project conceived, developed and implemented by the M.S. Swaminathan Research Foundation, a NGO located in Chennai, India. I then describe my field visits and observations and conclude with an analysis of the role and benefits of such projects, unresolved questions and issues, and possible directions for future work.

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Christian Sandvig (Ph.D Stanford) is an Academic Fellow at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University as well as an Associate Professor in Communication, Media, and the Coordinated Science Laboratory at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

Susanne Seitinger (MCP MIT, BA Princeton) is a Ph.D. student with the Smart Cities group at the MIT Media Lab. Her dissertation –Liberated Pixels: Alternative Narratives for Lighting Future Cities– explores the aesthetic and interactive potentials for future lighting and display infrastructures.

Ramesh Subramanian (PhD, MBA Rutgers) is a Visiting Fellow at the Information Society Project, Yale Law School as well as the Gabriel Ferrucci Professor of Information Systems at Quinnipiac University. His research interests focus on the intersection of IT and technology policy in developing countries, Security, Law, & Cross-cultural issues.

The Harvard-MIT-Yale Cyberscholar Working Group features ongoing research concerning the digital age. Meeting alternatively at Harvard, MIT, and Yale, the group aims to share and enrich knowledge among rising scholars. Sessions are designed to advance research through cross-disciplinary conversation.

This event is part of the Liberty Tree First Amendment Online Colloquium: http://www.law.yale.edu/intellectuallife/ISPevents.htm.  Future colloquium speakers will include Arianna Huffington, Beth Noveck, and David Post.

Frank Pasquale is a Yale ISP Fellow and is the Loftus Professor of Law at Seton Hall School of Law.  He joined Seton Hall after practicing law as an attorney at Arnold & Porter LLP, where his work included antitrust and intellectual property litigation. Professor Pasquale’s prior experience includes clerking for the Honorable Judge Kermit Lipez of the United States Court of Appeals for the First Circuit and serving as a fellow at the Institute for the Defense of Competition and Protection of Intellectual Property in Lima, Peru. During his time at Yale Law School, Professor Pasquale served as a teaching assistant for first year students and as an editor of the Yale Law and Policy Review and the Yale Symposium on Law and Technology before graduating with a J.D. in 2001.  Pasquale has focused his scholarship on enriching intellectual property and health law with insights from economics, philosophy, and social science. His work on search engines has been excerpted in Bellia, Post, & Berman’s Cyberlaw and delivered to a plenary session of the Intellectual Property Scholars Conference. His work on retainer medicine was selected for presentation at the St. Louis University Health Law Scholars Workshop. Professor Pasquale blogs at Concurring Opinions and Madisonian.net, and has has guest-blogged at Jurisdynamics. At the Co-Op, his posts focus on methodology in legal scholarship, health law, and IP. The Madisonian blog has a technology focus. Along with Gaia Bernstein and Jim Chen, Pasquale organized a virtual symposium at Law & Technology Theory. Pasquale has been quoted in the New York Times, San Francisco Chronicle, Los Angeles Times, Boston Globe, Financial Times, and many other publications. He has appeared on CNN to comment on Google’s China policy. He has been interviewed on internet regulation on David Levine’s Hearsay Culture podcast, WNYC’s Brian Lehrer Show, and on National Public Radio’s Talk of the Nation.Professor Pasquale has testified before Congress and before the New York City Broadband Advisory Commission. He presented Internet Nondiscrimination Principles for Competition Policy Online before the Task Force on Competition Policy and Antitrust Laws of the House Committee on the Judiciary, appearing with the General Counsels of Google, Microsoft, and Yahoo. He appeared with Congressman Bob Goodlatte to discuss Reputation and Privacy in an Age of Social Networking at the State of the Net West Policy Conference at Santa Clara Law School.

The Harvard-MIT-Yale Cyberscholar Working Group is a forum for fellows and affiliates studying issues confronting the information age to discuss their ongoing research. Each session is focused on the peer review and discussion of current projects submitted by a presenter. Meeting alternatively at Harvard, MIT, and Yale, the working group aims to expand the shared knowledge of young scholars by bringing together these preeminent centers of thought on issues confronting the information age. Discussion sessions are designed to facilitate advancements in the individual research of presenters and in turn encourage exposure among the participants to the multi-disciplinary features of the issues addressed by their own work.

Presentations will include:

Fernando Bermejo – How Do We Know What We Know about the Internet? The State of Online Measurement.

Besides our first-hand knowledge of the internet, acquired as online users, a great deal of what we know about the net derives from different forms of measurement and from data sources that provide a constant monitoring of online activities. However, most of this additional knowledge is rather incomplete, fragmented, heavily filtered, and opaque in its production. And while that might not matter to us as everyday users, this talk will argue that it should matter to us as scholars and researchers, it will examine the consequences of this scenario and explore possible alternatives.

Christopher Wong – Lost in Translation: The Open Patent Project

While patent databases, such as those provided by the USPTO or www.freepatentsonline.com, provide comprehensive information about the contents of a patent—the abstract, prior art references, specification, claims, drawings, etc.—they are limited in their scope and utility. This program is aimed at increasing the usefulness of patent databases by applying “tagging” and visualization technologies to make the information contained within the patent applications more functional and robust.  By allowing the public to apply “tags” to patent information we may create an ontology of related resources that provide context for understanding the information contained in patent documents.

Andrés Monroy-Hernández – Built from Scratch: Remixing and Online Communities of Cooperation

Andrés will describe the ways participants of the Scratch website – a large online community where users, primarily young people – engage in remixing of each others’ shared animations and video games. This website, in which young people have shared close to a million video games and animations, is examined as part of ongoing social computing research on networked technologies that support cooperation. In particular, he will focus on recent work that looks at young people’s attitudes towards remixing, such as the connection between plagiarism complaints and similarities between a remix and the work it is based on.

Fernando Bermejo is a Fellow at the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University, and Associate Professor of Communication at Universidad Rey Juan Carlos in Madrid.

Christopher Wong is a Visiting Fellow at the Information Society Project at Yale Law School and a Postgraduate Fellow at the Institute for Information Law & Policy at New York Law School. He is the former project manager of Peer-to-Patent and currently serves in an advisory role for both the US project and the recently launched Peer-to-Patent Australia.

Andrés Monroy-Hernández is a PhD student at the MIT Media Lab and lead researcher and designer of the Scratch online community. He holds a M.S. in Media Technology from MIT and a B.S. in Computer Science from Tec de Monterrey in México. http://www.mit.edu/~amonroy/

Julie Cohen, Professor of Law at Georgetown University Law Center, will give a talk entitled “The Structural Conditions of Human Flourishing in the Information Society.”  Her talk will be based on her upcoming Yale University Press book The Networked Self: Copyright, Privacy, and the Production of Networked Space.

Julie E. Cohen teaches and writes about intellectual property law and privacy law, with particular focus on copyright and on the intersection of copyright and privacy rights in the networked information society. She is a co-author of Copyright in a Global Information Economy (Aspen Law & Business, 2d ed. 2006), and is a member of the Advisory Boards of the Electronic Privacy Information Center and Public Knowledge. From 1995 to 1999, Professor Cohen taught at the University of Pittsburgh School of Law. From 1992 to 1995, she practiced with the San Francisco firm of McCutchen, Doyle, Brown & Enersen, where she specialized in intellectual property litigation. Professor Cohen received her A.B. from Harvard University and her J.D. from the Harvard Law School, where she was a Supervising Editor of the Harvard Law Review. She is a former law clerk to Judge Stephen Reinhardt of the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit.

"The Structural Conditions of Human Flourishing." You can call the talk "The Structural Conditions of Human Flourishing in the Information Society."  Here's an abstract:

Within U.S. legal and policy circles, the discourse of information policy reform has been organized principally around the themes of "access to knowledge" and "network neutrality." Each of those movements has contributed powerful insights to our understanding of the principles that should inform the legal and technical specification of information rights and architectures. Yet the discussion in Part II suggests the need for a more accurate understanding of the ways that the information environment can foster, or undermine, capabilities for human flourishing. We saw that play-including both intentional play and the fortuitous play of circumstances-is a vital ingredient in creative practice, subject-formation, and the evolving accommodation between networked artifacts and user behavior. Those processes do not follow automatic and inevitable trajectories. Everyday practice is highly robust as a phenomenon, but the specifics of everyday practice are contingent and extraordinarily vulnerable to environmental modulation. And the everyday behaviors of networked selves require spaces where they can be enacted, tools with which they can be pursued, and meaningful legal guarantees with which they can be claimed. This means that information policy problems cannot always be solved by prescribing greater "openness" or more "neutrality."

Beginning with the centrality of everyday practice and the overarching importance of play, this chapter derives three subsidiary principles that should inform the design of legal and technical architectures. The first principle remains that of access to knowledge; without the raw materials necessary for social and cultural participation, one cannot participate meaningfully in the development of culture and community, and without access to the appropriate tools, one cannot partake of the resources that the networked information society has to offer. The second and third principles, however, move beyond access to specify structural attributes of the networked information environment that are necessary to provide, and shelter, "breathing room" for everyday practice. In different ways, each principle takes aim at the growing imbalance between the seamless predictability of autonomic technologies and the transgressive potential of everyday practice. The second principle, operational transparency, seeks to render the network's geographies of accessibility and inaccessibility less opaque. To take full advantage of the network's potential to enable human flourishing, network users need access to information about how the network and its constituent artifacts and protocols work.

The final principle concerns the ways in which legal and technical boundaries that define the scope of copyright, privacy, and (un)authorized access to information technologies should be defined. To preserve room for play, those boundaries should afford degrees of freedom to access and repurpose cultural and technical materials, and should reserve to individuals and communities degrees of control over both personal information and the experienced boundaries of personal space. Such control is achieved most effectively when legal and technical architectures are characterized by semantic discontinuity-by gaps and inconsistencies into which the everyday practice of network users can move. In an increasingly networked information society, maintaining those gaps may require legal and technical interventions designed to circumscribe the authority of powerful state and commercial actors.

Please join us for the Harvard-MIT-Yale Cyberscholar Working Group scheduled for December 2, 2009 from 6:00-8:30 pm at Harvard.  The event will take place in Conference Room 202 of the Berkman Center at 23 Everett Street, Cambridge, Massachusetts. Please RSVP to Herkko Hietanen at herkko.hietanen@hiit.fi if you plan to attend.  Refreshments provided.   The following scholars will be featured at this month’s meeting:

David Singh Grewal is a Junior Fellow at the Harvard Society of Fellows, and an Affiliated Fellow at the Information Society Project at Yale Law School. His first book, Network Power: The Social Dynamics of Globalization was published by Yale University Press in 2008. He holds a JD from Yale, and is currently completing his PhD in the Harvard Government department, where he is finishing his dissertation, “The Invention of the Economy.” He is also on the board of the Biobricks Foundation, a non-profit working to develop an open-source platform for the emerging field of synthetic biology.

Donnie Hao Dong is a Fellow at Berkman Center and a Lecturer at Yunnan University (PRC). His research interests cover copyright law, cyber law and law and social development in digital age. He got a JSD from China University of Polictics and Law with his dissertation on the public domain in the context of Chinese copyright law. Now Donnie is a PhD Candidate in City University of Hong Kong closing his research on the lessons of Chinese copyright reform for digital age.  His publications, short essays and nags can be accessed at http://www.BLawgDog.com.

Mackenzie Cowell graduated from Davidson College with a BS in Biology in 2007 and currently works as a Research Assistant at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University.  He is booting up a public biotech lab in Boston (bosslab.org). He tweets: @100ideas.

Donnie Dong is going to present his studies of how the Utilitarian copyright of western word collides with Chinese copyright law.

David will examine the question of: Is there a way to bring “free culture” into biotechnology? His talk will explore one recent effort to do so: the creation of the Biobricks Public Agreement, a legal mechanism meant to assist the development of an open, shared platform in the emerging area of synthetic biology.

Mackenzie Cowell co-founded DIYbio.org after witnessing hundreds of undergraduate teams successfully design and build standardized biological parts and devices while competing in the International Genetically Engineered Machine competition, which Cowell helped organize at MIT from 2006-08.  DIYbio.org is now the center of a diverse and international community of people interested in amateur biotechnology, from artists to scientists to schoolchildren to garage entrepreneurs. In this presentation, Cowell will present some of the projects currently being developed by this community of non-institutional researchers.

Followed by Open Discussion

The “Harvard-MIT-Yale Cyberscholar Working Group” is a forum for fellows and affiliates of the Comparative Media Studies Program at MIT, Yale Law School’s Information Society Project, and the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University to discuss their ongoing research. Each session is focused on the peer review and discussion of current projects submitted by a presenter. Meeting alternatively at Harvard, MIT, Yale, the working group aims to expand the shared knowledge of young scholars by bringing together these preeminent centers of thought on issues confronting the information age. Discussion sessions are designed to facilitate advancements in the individual research of presenters and in turn encourage exposure among the participants to the multi-disciplinary features of the issues addressed by their own work.

The event will take place at 3:00 p.m. in Room 128 of Yale Law School. Refreshments will be provided.

The Ninth Circuit is poised to rule on three appeals that bring up the same issue: can copyright owners use contracts of adhesion to trump exceptions written into the Copyright Act for the public’s benefit? When you buy a CD, book, or DVD, the Copyright Act lets you resell that copy without having to worry about infringing the exclusive right of distribution. Can a label or “license” change that? And when you buy software, you can use and adapt it, without having to worry about infringing the exclusive right of reproduction. Can that be changed by “license”?

At the border between copyright law and personal property law, we’ll discuss what’s at stake for the public interest, the personal property rights of copy owners, and the contractual powers of copyright owners.

The event will take place at 4:10 p.m. in Room 121 of Yale Law School. Refreshments will be provided.

Please save the date for the Fourth Access to Knowledge Conference (A2K4) scheduled to take place at Yale Law School on February 12-13, 2010.

Access to knowledge (A2K) is about designing intellectual property laws, telecommunication policies, and technical architectures that encourage broader participation in cultural, civic, and educational affairs; expand the benefits of scientific and technological advancement; and promote innovation, development, and social progress across the globe.

The Information Society Project at Yale Law School has already hosted three major conferences on access to knowledge. These helped to lay intellectual groundwork for theorizing A2K as a framework for public policy and to consolidate a broad international A2K movement.

This year, we will again host a major A2K conference, but with a more specialized theme: the intersection between access to knowledge and human rights.

The right to take part in cultural life, to share in scientific progress, the rights to education, health care, and food: all are impacted by policies and movements around intellectual property and Internet freedom. This conference seeks to lay the groundwork – conceptual and strategic – to build bridges between the A2K and human rights communities pursuing common goals of promoting greater access to knowledge, culture, technology and tools for innovation worldwide.

The two-day conference will feature a diverse range of academics and practitioners in plenary panels on topics including Access to Knowledge and International Human Rights, Technologies of Dissent, The Right to Culture and Science, and Digital Education and The Right to Learn. The conference will also include breakout sessions of working groups organized around specific issue areas such as: climate change, gender equality, Internet freedom, food security, access to medicines or other topics, depending on the interests of attendees and partner organizations.

The conference is being hosted by the Yale Information Society Project, an intellectual center examining the implications of the Internet and new information technologies for law and society.  More information can be found at http://yaleisp.org/2009/11/a2k4/ or http://isp.law.yale.edu.

To subscribe to the Yale ISP events announcement list, visit http://mailman.yale.edu/mailman/listinfo/isp-internal.

Gigi Sohn is an internationally known communications attorney and the founder of Public Knowledge, a Washington, D.C.-based public interest group working to defend citizens’ rights in the emerging digital culture.