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.

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.

This event will feature a “Digital Democracy Debate” with Matthew Hindman, author of The Myth of Digital Democracy and Micah Sifry, co-founder of Personal Democracy Forum and Tech President. Rasmus Kleis Nielsen, formerly a visiting student at Harvard’s Berkman Center, will moderate the debate.

Please RSVP to Ben Peters (bjp2108@columbia.edu) if you plan to attend. Refreshments provided.

This workshop offers a forum for debating the signal claim of Matthew Hindman that digital democracy, as most online commentators know it, is a myth. The forum builds on Hindman’s afternoon talk at Yale Law School titled “The Elephant and the Butterfly: Audience Size and the Political Economy of the Web.” All in attendance are invited to read chapters four, five, and seven from Hindman’s The Myth of Digital Democracy. A second piece “Closing the Frontier: Political Blogs, the 2008 Election, and the Online Public Sphere” will be forwarded to anyone who reserves as spot, as requested, from Ben Peters at bjp2108@columbia.edu.

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, 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.

As the conference description states, “We are arguably in the midst of massive transformations in economy, labor, and life related to digital media. The purpose of this conference is to interrogate these dramatic shifts restructuring leisure, consumption, and production since the mid-century.”

Laura DeNardis will speak Saturday at 10:00 a.m. on Internet Governance: Where Digital Labor Determines Digital Freedom.  Laura Forlano will speak Saturday at 1:45 p.m. on Writing for the Algorithm: Digital Labor and Mobile Work.  James Grimmelman will speak Friday at 6:00 p.m. on Ethical Visions of Copyright Law.  Frank Pasquale will speak Friday at 2:15 p.m. on Distributive Justice Online.  Ben Peters will speak Saturday at 1:45 p.m. on Arendt and the Creative Toil of Counting.

ISP fellows moderating panels include Ted Byfield, Julia Sonnevend, and Elizabeth Stark.

Please see the conference web site for more information.

How Computational Science is Changing the Scientific Method

As computation becomes more pervasive in scientific research, it seems to have become a mode of discovery in itself, a “third branch” of the scientific method. Greater computation also facilitates transparency in research through the unprecedented ease of communication of the associated code and data, but typically code and data are not made available and we are missing a crucial opportunity to control for error, the central motivation of the scientific method, through reproducibility.  In this talk I explore these two changes to the scientific method and present possible ways to bring reproducibility into today’ scientific endeavor. I propose a licensing structure for all components of the research, called the “Reproducible Research Standard,” to align intellectual property law with longstanding communitarian scientific norms and encourage greater error control and verifiability in computational science.

Yochai Benkler: Friday Keynote Address

Mozilla: The Future of Open Video

Lizz Winstead: Featured Talk

This conference explored business models, legal systems, and technical architectures for open Internet video that promotes democratic freedoms, free culture, open innovation, and participatory rather than passive consumption.

Highlights of the conference include:

Staggering Number of Participants

More than 800 people attended the conference in person, and thousands more attended via live video streaming and on twitter (#openvideo) and Facebook.  One  interesting aspect of the conference was its bringing together of such a diverse group including media activists, new media entrepreneurs, academics, educators, and content producers.

Keynote Addresses

The two-day conference included rousing keynote addresses by Yochai Benkler, Jonathan Zittrain, and Lizz Winstead, the co-founder of Air America Radio and co-creator of the Daily Show.

Sponsors

Mozilla, RedHat, Intelligent Television, LiveStream, see3, Pond5, Level(3), Sunlight Foundation, Akamai, and Safe Creative.

Organizers

Co-organized by members of the Yale ISP, iCommons, Kaltura, and the Participatory Culture Foundation.  Partners  included Harvard’s Berkman Center, the Information Law Institute at NYU School of Law, Creative Commons, Free Press, Columbia University’s Center for New Media Teaching and Learning, the Telematics Freedom Foundation, Big Think, The Workbook Project, Magnify.net, FGV Law School in Brazil, and Public Knowledge.

Presentations by Internet Video Entrepreneurs

Various panels featured the work of video entrepreneurs including: Mike Hudack, CEO of blip.tv; Avner Ronen, CEO of Boxee; Jennifer Taylor, Flash Product Manager at Adobe; Shay David, co-founder of Kaltura; engineers from Sun Microsystems; and Nikhil Chandhok, Senior Product Manager of YouTube.

Online Video Activism and Politics

Keynote by Amy Goodman, host and Executive Producer of the news program Democracy Now to discuss independent and citizen journalism; panel on the future of public media; panel on transmedia activism, creating a cross-media platform for social issue campaigns; and many other issues.

Fair Use Discussion

Anthony Falzone, the Executive Director of the Fair Use Project at Stanford Law School and Corynne McSherry of the Electronic Frontier Foundation.

Anyone interested in learning more about the conference is invited to explore openvideoconference.org.

Congratulations again to the Yale ISP organizers and partners and a special thanks to Perry Fetterman, Adi Kamdar, Lea Shaver, Nick Bramble, and other members of the Yale ISP for their contributions at the conference.  The ISP will be developing policy papers/primers as a follow-up to the conference and will be continuing our efforts to advance a global Open Video Alliance (OVA).

In her presentation, Shaver suggested that open video promotes human rights in two ways, strengthening freedom of expression and cultural participation.

Lea Shaver, Yale ISP

Using examples from the recent mass demonstrations in Iran, Shaver highlighted how people were using digital video to defend their human rights, and examined the limits to these possibilities imposed by the current closed nature of most video technology.

The slides from Shaver’s presentation, including a complete transcript, are available for download here: [ppt]

A video recording of the panel will be made available online from: http://openvideoonference.org

The “Open Video Conference” is sponsored by Yale Law School’s Information Society Project (ISP), the Participatory Culture Foundation, and Kaltura, in partnership with Mozilla, Creative Commons, and the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard.

“What is Open Video?” an open video

Detailed conference schedule

Register now to attend

A partial list of highlighted speakers is now available…

• Clay Shirky — Professor at NYU’s Interactive Telecommunications Program
• Yochai Benkler — Professor at Harvard’s Berkman Center
• Lizz Winstead — Co-creator of The Daily Show and Shoot the Messenger
• Christopher Blizzard — Director of Evangelism at Mozilla Corporation
• Nina Paley — Creator/Director of Sita Sings the Blues
• Josh Silver — Executive Director of Free Press
• Corynne McSherry — Attorney at EFF
• Xeni Jardin — Co-editor of Boing Boing
• Ted Hope — Film Producer (of nearly sixty features including 21 Grams and most recently Adventureland)
• Avner Ronen — CEO at Boxee
• Eclectic Method — Live Video Remix DJs
• Jason Wishnow — Video Director of the TED Conference
• Lauren Cornell — Executive Director of Rhizome and Adjunct Curator at the New Museum
• Nikhil Chandhok — Senior Product Manager, YouTube
• Anthony Falzone — Executive Director of the Fair Use Project at Stanford Law School
• Mohamed Nanabhay — Head of New Media at Al Jazeera
• Matt Mason — Author of the Pirate’s Dilemma
• Sam Gregory — Program Director of WITNESS
• Jon Lech Johansen, aka DVD Jon — Founder of doubleTwist
• Jonathan McIntosh — Video Remixer and Activist
• Jamie King — Director of Steal this Film I and II
• Melinda Lee — Chief Content Officer of Uncensored Interview
• Eyebeam — Kenseth Armstead, Jon Cohrs, Jeff Crouse, and Michael Mandiberg
• Lance Weiler — Filmmaker and Co-founder of WorkBook Project
• Mark Surman — Executive Director of the Mozilla Foundation
• Mike Hudack — CEO of blip.tv
• Eirik Solheim — Project Manager at NRK (Norway’s Public Broadcaster)
• Peter Kaufman — Executive Director, Intelligent Television
• Jack Brighton — WILL Public Media
• Ryanne Hodson & Jay Dedman — RyanIsHungry.com, Video Activists
• Mark Tribe — Artist and Professor at Brown University
• Neil Sieling — Media Fellow at American U’s Center for Social Media
• Sumner Paine — Product Manager Adobe Media Player, Adobe Systems
• Tracey Jaquith — Web Engineer for Archive.org
• Henrik Moltke — Director of Good Copy Bad Copy
• Brett Gaylor — Director of RiP: A Remix Manifesto

To be funded primarily by governments, the HIF would give participating pharmaceutical companies the option to register any new drug for compensation. The companies would promise to make the registered drugs available at the lowest feasible cost of production and distribution wherever they are needed. In exchange, they would receive annual reward payments based on the global health impact of the drugs during their first ten years. An international, interdisciplinary team is working to specify the operating mechanism of the Fund.

“Among other benefits, the HIF would foster innovation to address illnesses concentrated among the poor, such as tuberculosis and malaria, because innovators cannot recover their research and development costs from sales to the poor,” said Yale Law School Visiting Professor Frank Pasquale ’01, who will participate in the discussion. “But with the option of an alternative reward based on health impact, these neglected diseases would become some of the most lucrative R&D opportunities.”

Other event participants include philosopher Thomas Pogge and economist Aidan Hollis, who will summarize the HIF proposal. Harvard Law Professor Terry Fisher and Professor Pasquale will comment on the issues in intellectual property and health regulation raised by the proposal.

For further details on the Health Impact Fund, including a downloadable book-length treatment, visit www.healthimpactfund.org.