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).

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 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.

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Amy Goodman

Amy Goodman is an award-winning investigative journalist and syndicated columnist, author and the host of Democracy Now! airing on more than 800 public television/radio stations worldwide. Goodman is the first journalist to receive the Right Livelihood Award, widely known as the ‘Alternative Nobel Prize’ for “developing an innovative model of truly independent grassroots political journalism that brings to millions of people the alternative voices that are often excluded by the mainstream media.” The Independent of London named Amy Goodman and Democracy Now! “an inspiration”; pulsemedia.org placed Goodman at the top of their 20 Top Global Media Figures.

Goodman is the author of four New York Times bestsellers. Her latest book is Breaking the Sound Barrier; she co-authored the first three bestsellers, Standing Up to the Madness, Static, and The Exception to the Rulers, with her brother, journalist David Goodman.

Breaking the Sound Barrier

Award-winning investigative journalist Amy Goodman breaks through corporate media lies, sound-bites and silence with passionate reporting as host of Democracy Now! Her latest bestseller, Breaking the Sound Barrier, proves the power of independent journalism in the struggle for a better world. From community organizers in New Orleans, to the victims of torture and police violence, to those struggling to survive in Haiti, we are given the extraordinary opportunity to hear ordinary people standing up and speaking out.

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The series is sponsored by the Liberty Tree Initiative, McCormick Foundation, and the First Amendment Center.

The Information Society Project (ISP) at Yale Law School is an intellectual center studying the impact of the Internet and new information technologies on law and society. The Knight Law and Media Program examines the intersection of First Amendment law, media, and journalism.

Can We Defend Free Speech on the Net?

If it is true, as John Gilmore reportedly said several decades ago, that “the First Amendment is just a local ordinance on the Net,”should we defend the principle of free speech across the Internet, and, if so, how do we do that?  Is that merely an exercise in cultural imperialism, exporting U.S. law and U.S.-centric principles outside of our borders?  Is the “bordered Internet” — an Internet carved up into separate domains within which the law of each of the 180 or so
sovereign states around the globe prevails — the best that we can hope for?  I will argue that it is not, and that the freedom of speech is worth defending across the globe-spanning Internet, not because it is enshrined in the US Constitution but because it is a higher-order principle applicable to all.  As to the “how,” I will sketch out an argument about a new politics for the Internet, and the new conception of “civic virtue” and citizenship that I believe are called for if we are to collectively realize the freedom-enhancing potential of this new place.

About David Post

David Post is the I. Herman Stern Professor of Law at the Beasley School of Law at Temple University, where he teaches intellectual property law and the law of cyberspace. Professor Post is also a Fellow at the Center for Democracy and Technology, Senior Fellow of the Institute for Information Law & Policy at New York Law School, an Adjunct Scholar at the Cato Institute, and a contributor to the influential Volokh Conspiracy blog.

Professor Post is the author of Cyberlaw: Problems of Policy and Jurisprudence in the Information Age (3d Edition, West, 2007) (co-authored with Paul Schiff Berman and Patricia Bellia), and In Search of Jefferson’s Moose: Notes on the State of Cyberspace (Oxford
U. Press 2008)

LAW ON DISPLAY:
The Digital Transformation of Legal Persuasion and Judgment

The law, like the rest of culture, is awash in pictures of all kinds, mostly produced and circulated using digital technologies. LAW ON DISPLAY explores how this proliferation of digital pictures changes the nature of legal argument and decision making and, ultimately, our notions of justice. The authors, Neal Feigenson and Christina Spiesel, will speak at the Slifka Center at 4:00 on April 13, 2010, pursuing one of the central themes in their book: naïve realism about both pictures and the technologies that make them possible. They will show and discuss materials from two case studies from the book (one involving surveillance video; the other, video and computer animation). They will also discuss law’s possible near future: Law’s increasing mediation by computers and its presence online offer benefits to dispute resolution but also presents risks to justice should naïve realism in response to pictures be joined with naïve realism about the technology behind the computer screen.

Christina Spiesel is senior research scholar at Yale Law School and adjunct professor at Quinnipiac University School of Law and New York Law School.

Neal Feigenson is Carmen Tortora Professor of Law at Quinnipiac University School of Law and author of Legal Blame: How Jurors Think and Talk About Accidents.

Should the FCC Let AT&T Be? Standing on the Shoulders of Weary Giants of Flesh and Steel

The Federal Communications Commission is in the midst of two rulemakings that will shape the future of the Internet. The National Broadband Plan rulemaking, recently completed, includes a series of recommendations for building out fast, competitive, and nation-wide broadband access. The Open Internet rulemaking, currently underway, has more to do with the “neutrality” of that infrastructure and whether or not it will continue to be open to the construction of reliable application and content platforms by innovators unaffiliated with the owners of the underlying infrastructure.

Skeptics of these rulemakings—and skeptics of governmental regulation of the Internet more broadly—have raised institutional, constitutional, and jurisdictional objections to the FCC’s authority. This talk has three parts. First, I will offer a rough map of the political economies of Internet regulation (and deregulation), and discuss whether regulation is an appropriate metaphor for what’s going on here. Second, focusing on a case study in broadband and education, I’ll examine some ways in which the two rulemakings might promote the progress of science and useful arts more effectively than full deregulation or other statutory mechanisms. Finally, we’ll talk about the First Amendment objections to proposed Internet nondiscrimination and transparency rules, with an eye on how common carrier status might ground the FCC’s rulemaking authority and balance competing assertions of free speech rights by network providers and by users.

Nicholas Bramble is a Postdoctoral Associate in Law and Kauffman Fellow in Law at the Information Society Project at Yale Law School, where he conducts research on the problems of collective action and the promises of civic engagement relating to open access in the university setting. Prior to his appointment at Yale, Mr. Bramble was a judicial clerk for the Honorable Charles F. Lettow of the U.S. Court of Federal Claims. He is a graduate of Stanford University and Harvard Law School, where he was the online managing editor of the Journal of Law & Technology.

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.