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)

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.

The Google Books Settlement: Class Action, Copyright, Antitrust, or All of the Above? The proposed settlement in the Google Books case obviously raises interesting issues in civil procedure, copyright (domestic and international), and antitrust. But the actual analyses within these areas trail off surprisingly rapidly into doctrinal minutiae and difficult framing problems. Only by looking at the three of them together is it possible to recover a genuinely synoptic view of the settlement. I will discuss the factual basics of the settlement, along with the essential issues it raises in these various bodies of law–and then dazzle, entertain, and enlighten by showing how profoundly they’re connected.

Principles for Radical Copyright Reform

What’s wrong with copyright law? Currently, it is illegal to watch most DVDs on a linux operating system, to play the radio on too many speakers in a shop, and even possibly to watch “The Wizard of Oz” while playing “The Dark Side of the Moon” in the background. Do these apparently absurd results “promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts”? What rules might promote authorship better? This talk will discuss the purpose of copyright and principles for redrafting the copyright statute to produce sensible rules — and a richer culture.

Christina Mulligan is a Fellow at the Information Society Project at Yale Law School. Before joining the ISP, she was Production Editor and Article Editor for the Journal of Law & Technology at Harvard Law School and an attorney with the Institute for Justice. She is the author of the article Perfect Enforcement of Law, 14 Rich. J.L. & Tech. 13 (2008). Her research interests include intellectual property reform, technology policy, and the proper role of government in society.

This colloquium, sponsored by the Liberty Tree Initiative, McCormick Foundation and the First Amendment Center, will feature the following speakers: Frank Pasquale on Search Engine Law and the First Amendment February 5 at noon; Arianna Huffington on the first amendment online February 22 at 4:00 p.m.; David Post on Protected Political Speech in Email – April 9 at noon; and Beth Noveck on Open Government and the First Amendment in April at Yale Law School.

Arianna Huffington is the co-founder and editor-in-chief of The Huffington Post, a nationally syndicated columnist, and author of eleven books. She is also co-host of “Left, Right & Center,” public radio’s popular political roundtable program.

In May 2005, she launched The Huffington Post, a news and blog site that has quickly become one of the most widely-read, linked to, and frequently-cited media brands on the Internet.

In 2006, she was named to the Time 100, Time Magazine’s list of the world’s 100 most influential people.

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.

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.