A2K4 Panel V: Freedom to Innovate: Knowledge, Technology, Culture

by David Robinson | February 10, 2010 | a2k4, conference | 1 Comment

We live in an age of decentralized innovation in which civil liberties and cultural freedom depend on the freedom to innovate and share innovations with others. Increasingly, cultural freedom, access to knowledge, and freedom of expression depend on the ability of entrepreneurs to create new tools for sharing, producing, and distributing content. Increasingly, new ideas and new designs come from open source entrepreneurship communities in which loosely affiliated groups of individuals produce new knowledge and new technological tools. Innovation in software and hardware is inextricably connected to cultural innovation and the
dissemination of knowledge.

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A2K4 Panel VI: The Right to Science and Culture: Access and Participation

by M. Maddox | February 10, 2010 | a2k4, conference | No Comments

Article 27 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights recognizes the right of everyone to take part in cultural life, and to share in the benefits of scientific progress. This “right to science and culture” has great relevance for access to knowledge issues, but is still in the early stages of development.

This panel will explore the multiple faces and possible dimensions of the right to science and culture, examine the challenges and tensions inherent in conceiving of these goals as human rights, and identify ways for human rights and A2K advocates to utilize international human rights norms and fora, as well as national rights frameworks, to support related goals.

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A2K4 Workshop: Identifying Challenges and Opportunities for an African Information Ethics

by Grace | February 10, 2010 | a2k4, conference | 4 Comments

Organized by the UW-Milwaukee School of Information Studies

As our contemporary information society continues to take hold on the African continent, there is a pressing need to recognize and formalize an “African information ethics”, that is, understanding and applying principles of information ethics (access to knowledge, intellectual property, information literacy, intellectual freedom, privacy) within the unique context of the African information and knowledge society.

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A2K4 Workshop: The Right to Read: Copyright and Access for Persons with Disabilities

by Janice Ta | February 10, 2010 | a2k4, conference | No Comments

Organized by Knowledge Ecology International (KEI)

Persons who are blind, have limited vision, have dyslexia, or other disabilities face considerable challenges in access to books and other documents. New information technologies have provided expanded opportunities for presenting information in formats that are much more accessible, such as refreshable Braille, large type, synthetic speech, or in other formats that expand access.

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A2K4 Workshop: The Right to Development and the WIPO Development Agenda

by nadia | February 10, 2010 | a2k4, conference | No Comments

Organized by the International Centre for Trade and Sustainable Development (ICTSD)

The right to development (RTD), proclaimed in 1986, is “an inalienable human right by virtue of which every human person and all peoples are entitled to participate in, contribute to, and enjoy economic, social, cultural and political development, in which all human rights and fundamental freedoms can be fully realized.”  It requires the international community to promote fair development policies and effective international cooperation.

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A2K4 Panel VIII: Rights-Based Strategies for Advancing Access to Knowledge

by Marisa | February 10, 2010 | a2k4, conference | No Comments

The final panel of the conference focuses on Rights-Based Strategies for Advancing Access to Knowledge.  Much of the conference has focused on synergies between access to knowledge and human rights goals in specific subject areas. The concluding panel will discuss more generally the broader challenges and opportunities implicated by attempts to promote A2K goals through a human rights framework.

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February 5 Frank Pasquale Lecture on Search as Speech

by Laura DeNardis | February 4, 2010 | ISP speaker series, announcements | No Comments

You are cordially invited to a special Information Society Project and Knight Law and Media Program lunch speaker series featuring Frank Pasquale discussing “Search as Speech: Does the First Amendment Limit Regulation of Google?” on Friday, February 5 at noon in Room 128 of Yale Law School.

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Liberty Tree First Amendment Online Colloquium at Yale Law School

by Laura DeNardis | January 29, 2010 | Uncategorized | No Comments

The Yale ISP is pleased to announce the Liberty Tree First Amendment Online Colloquium at Yale Law School.  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.

All events are free and open to the public and will take place at Yale Law School.

Cyberscholar Working Group Scheduled for February 3 at MIT

by Laura DeNardis | January 29, 2010 | announcements, events | No Comments

The next Harvard-MIT-Yale Cyberscholar Working Group will take place Wednesday, February 3, 2010 from 6:00 pm – 8:30 pm in Room E14-633 (6th floor), MIT Campus, 75 Amherst Street, Cambridge, MA.  Yale ISP Fellow Chris Wong will be a featured scholar presenting his work “Lost in Translation: The Open Patent Project.”

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/

Yale ISP’s Growing International Network Featured in Yale Law Report

by Laura DeNardis | January 27, 2010 | news | No Comments

The Yale Information Society Project has been involved in a number of international activities in the past year, hosting conferences devoted to promoting access to knowledge and exploring the future of journalism, among other topics.

The center’s activities have included work with institutions across the world, includingnew research on India, China, Argentina, Ethiopia, and South Africa. Read about these activities in the new edition of the Yale Law Report.

Julie Cohen Lecture January 29

by Laura DeNardis | January 27, 2010 | ISP speaker series, announcements | No Comments

You are cordially invited to the first Information Society Project speaker series event of the new semester, scheduled for Friday, January 29 at noon in the Sterling Memorial Library Lecture Hall (location to be confirmed the week of the lecture).  This event is co-sponsored by the Yale University Library and is part of the library’s Copyright Lecture Series.

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.

Sampling of Net Neutrality Comments Submitted to FCC

by Nicholas Bramble | January 20, 2010 | Uncategorized | 3 Comments

Because it’s rather difficult to search the FCC site for comments on its Notice of Proposed Rulemaking “In the Matter of Preserving the Open Internet / Broadband Internet Practices” (hint: try searching for proceeding # 09-191 and excluding brief comments), I’ve decided to provide a highly unscientific sampling of 25 or so of the more interesting or relevant comments & ex parte meetings I’ve come across. If you notice additional interesting submissions, let me know. I’ll be updating this page with summaries of the comments in question; of course, many of these documents are several hundred pages long, so my summaries won’t capture every nuance of each comment. Still, I hope this will be useful for analyzing the alliances and arguments that are slowly being forged in response to the FCC’s notice. (The groupings below are intended to convey rough similarities in the nature of the organizations, but not necessarily in the *perspectives* of the organizations re the question of net neutrality or any other question.)

• Free Press (comment)
• Center for Democracy & Technology (comment)
• Electronic Frontier Foundation (comment)
  • argues that the FCC lacks any statutory foundation for its rulemaking and seeks to distinguish reasonable network management from efforts to block copyright infringement.
• Public Knowledge, New America Foundation, Media Access Project, Consumers Union, & Center for Media Justice (comment)
• Future of Privacy Forum (comment)

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• Verizon & Verizon Wireless (comment)
• AT&T (comment)
  • argues that conversion of broadband networks into “dumb pipes” is inconsistent with history of Internet engineering and in fact would render Internet less neutral.
• Time Warner Cable (comment)
• Telefónica, S.A. Spain (comment)
• Comcast (comment)
• Sprint-Nextel (comment)
• Verizon + Google joint submission (comment)

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• Google (comment)
• Skype (comment)
• Vonage (comment)
• Open Internet Coalition (comment)

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• Global Crossing (comment)
• Fiber-to-the-Home Council (comment)
  • seeks to define “reasonable network management” from perspective of several wireline network engineers.
• Cisco (comment)
  • advocates for cautious case-by-case approach to adjudication, consistent with Comcast adjudication based on Internet Policy Statement, rather than codification of bright-line rules which might not be adaptable to changing business/technology environment.

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• RIAA (comment)
• MPAA (comment)
• Independent Film & Television Alliance (comment)
• Online Game Developers (meeting)
• Sony (comment)

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• U.S. Chamber of Commerce (comment)
• Communication Workers of America (comment)
• Christian Coalition (statement)

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• Timothy Lee (comment)
• Barbara Esbin (comment)
• Tim Wu (comment)
  • contextualizes net neutrality by examining historical regulatory perspective towards “close cooperation between America’s most powerful firms and its most powerful information and transportation networks.”

Register now for A2K4: Access to Knowledge and Human Rights Conference

by Lea Shaver | January 19, 2010 | Uncategorized | No Comments

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 and impact upon policies and movements around intellectual property and Internet freedom.

This two-day 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 conference will feature a diverse range of academics and practitioners in panels on topics including Perspectives on Access to Knowledge and Human Rights, Technologies of Dissent, The Right To Health, Digital Education, Freedom to Innovate, The Right to Science and Culture, Information Ethics, The Right to Development, Accessibility and the Right to Read, and Rights-Based Strategies for Advancing Access to Knowledge.

For more information, schedule, speakers list, program, and to register, please visit: http://www.law.yale.edu/intellectuallife/a2k4.htm.

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