Thursday March 24^th, 2011, 6-8pm
Yale Law School, Room 127

Steve Coast is the Founder of OpenStreetMap, a free editable map of the world, and Principal Architect at Microsoft’s Bing Mobile.  GIS users at Yale and elsewhere will be familiar with OpenStreetMap.org as a “go to” source for the most complete geographic data for both developed and underdeveloped parts of the globe.

During the response to the 2010 Haiti earthquake, OpenStreetMap.org and CrisisCommons.org volunteers used available satellite imagery to map the roads, buildings and refugee camps of Port-au-Prince in just two days, building “the most complete digital map of Haiti’s roads.” The resulting data and maps have been used by organizations providing relief aid, such as the World Bank, the European Commission Joint Research Centre, the Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, UNOSAT and others.

At Midnight, Tuesday, March 15th, 2011, the OpenStreetMap user base numbered 371,657, with over 2.2 billion GPS points uploaded.

Steve’s talk will focus on his work with OpenStreetMap.org and his interest in emerging methods of geographically organizing data and search capabilities.

Q&A session to follow.

For more info on Steve Coast, see: http://www.stevecoast.com/
For more info on OpenStreetMap, see: http://www.openstreetmap.org
For more info on CrisisCommons, see: http://crisiscommons.org

Bill Patry, senior copyright counsel at Google, met with law students, Information Society Project fellows and others at Yale Law School on March 3.  The topic of discussion was a draft chapter of Patry’s upcoming book on the subject of how to fix the copyright system.  Patry, a scholar of copyright law history, described the evolution to the current day and his own increasing involvement in the issues over the years, including the publication of his last book, Moral Panics and the Copyright Wars.

Discussions covered issues such as who is the target audience of the book and of the debate.  The new book is likely to generate significant discussion about how content- sharing can be brought up to date with technology and the digital age.

Other issues were orphan works – for whom the copyright owner cannot be found, transfers of rights, and ever-increasing terms of copyright protection with less and less actual copying.

Patry was also asked about digital convergence and ways to protect copyright owners.  He described a digital reference tool that copyright holders can use to track content, such as used on YouTube, which offers options of blocking, tracking, and monetizing.  The latter may be used by copyright owners who welcome the dissemination of their content and can help avoid the unpopular notice-and-takedown approach.

Patry also discussed a suggestion he made that exclusive rights need to be replaced in many cases by a right of remuneration for authors, along with a right of access by the public.”  He discussed alternative sources of revenue for authors through means other than digital rights management.

The event was held within the context of this semester’s reading group on international IP policy led by ISP Fellow William New, director of Intellectual Property Watch in Geneva, Switzerland.  The Information Society Project arranged a lunch event held in the distinguished law school faculty lounge.

You are cordially invited to the next Information Society Project speaker series event, scheduled for Friday, February 25, at 12:10 p.m. in Room 120 of Yale Law School.  This week we will be joined by Tarleton Gillespie, who will discuss “The Private Governance of Digital Content, or how Apple intends to offer you ‘freedom from porn.”

About the Talk: “The Private Governance of Digital Content, or how Apple intends to offer you ‘freedom from porn.”

Digital intermediaries like YouTube, Flickr, Facebook, Apple, and Twitter are emerging as important new curators of public discourse.  These major online media platforms, social networking sites, and mobile technology providers all make decisions about what can be said and done on their sites and devices.  This is, of course, not surprising.  But the particular character of these decisions, and where, how, and why they make and enforce these rules, have real consequences for the contours of public expression in a digital age.  As more and more of our public discourse, cultural production, and creative interactions with others move online, and this handful of massive, privately-owned digital intermediaries continue to grow in economic and cultural power, it is crucial that we examine the ‘curatorial’ choices they make about the content they host.

Beyond the specific rules being imposed, the techniques they use for enforcing these policies can have their own implications.  They curate in particular ways, and they embody a relationship to content to the site’s users and to policymakers.  Some of these techniques, such as rating content and restricting access to it based on the age of the user, or trying to cultivate informal social norms of propriety and healthy debate, are like those long practiced by broadcasters and publishers.  Others are specific to digital platforms, either because they address the specific challenges and opportunities of user-generated content, or because they take advantage of the particular technical features of the information environment to identify, assess, and restrict content in ways that could not be done in an analog medium.  In this presentation Tarleton will catalog these emerging modes of private governance of content, and discuss the implications of these policies and interventions for the character of online public discourse.

About Tarleton Gillespie:

Tarleton Gillespie is an assistant professor in the Department of Communication at Cornell University, affiliated with the Information Science program and the Science & Technology Studies department, and the author of the book Wired Shut: Copyright and the Shape of Digital Culture.  He is also a non-residential fellow with the Stanford Center for Internet and Society at the Stanford Law School.