If anyone is interested in reading the draft before (or after), you can find it at <http://wendy.seltzer.org/drafts/seltzer-softwarepatent.pdf>
Software Patents and/or Software Development

Abstract:
Many contemporary treatments of the patent system begin by recognizing that patents may introduce costs and inefficiencies, but conclude that since patents serve a necessary function as incentives to innovate, we must bear and mitigate their costs.

In the case of software patents, Wendy challenges the incentive side of the equation: Patents do not provide a useful incentive to innovation in the software industry, because the patent promise ill-suits the engineering and development practices and business strategies of software production.

Even an ideally implemented software patent — well examined, fully disclosed and enabling, properly scoped in light of the prior art — would fail to serve the incentive functions intended by the Constitution, the Patent Act, and standard patent theory.

Bio:
Wendy Seltzer is a Fellow with Yale Law School’s Information Society Project, researching “openness” in intellectual property, innovation, privacy, and free expression online. As a Fellow with Harvard’s Berkman Center for Internet & Society, Wendy founded and leads the Chilling Effects Clearinghouse, helping Internet users to understand their rights in response to cease-and-desist threats. She serves on the Board of Directors of The Tor Project, promoting privacy and anonymity research, education, and technology.

She has taught Intellectual Property, Internet Law, Antitrust, Copyright, and Information Privacy at American University Washington College of Law, Northeastern Law School, and Brooklyn Law School and was a Visiting Fellow with the Oxford Internet Institute, teaching a joint course with the Said Business School, Media Strategies for a Networked World. Previously, she was a staff attorney with online civil liberties group Electronic Frontier Foundation, specializing in intellectual property and First Amendment issues, and a litigator with Kramer Levin Naftalis & Frankel.

Wendy speaks and writes on copyright, patent, privacy, free and open source software, and the public interest online, seeking to improve technology policy in support of user-driven innovation. She has an A.B. from Harvard College and J.D. from Harvard Law School, and occasionally takes a break from legal code to program (Perl and MythTV). She blogs occasionally at http://wendy.seltzer.org/blog/ and http://freedom-to-tinker.com/

We look forward to seeing you there.

About the Talk:
Substantial state (and private) efforts, both altruistic and power-oriented, seek to shift flows of information and systems that affect those flows in target societies, In this talk, Monroe will raise some issues and problems that have occurred during the course of his work in the last five years. These will include efforts to regulate transnational satellite signals, construct or shape media in conflict zones and competition to shape narratives of Internet regulation. One overall issue is the cumulative impact of these transnational efforts on conceptions of free expression.

About Monroe Price:
Professor Monroe E. Price is Director of the Center for Global Communication Studies at the Annenberg School for the University of Pennsylvania and director of the Squadron Program in Law, Media and Society at Cardozo School of Law. He is the author, among other publications, of “Media and Sovereignty: Global Information Revolution and its Challenge to State Power.” His most recent book is “Objects of Remembrance: A Memoir of American Opportunities and Viennese Dreams.” He is a graduate of Yale College and Yale Law School.

Jean Burgess of Australia’s Queensland University of Technology visited Yale Law School to present at the ISP’s weekly speaker series.

Together with Joshua Green of MIT, she is editor of YouTube: Online Video and Participatory Culture. The book is due for release May 26, 2009; we were treated to a sneak preview of its findings.

Dr. Burgess’ presentation connected YouTube’s undetermined and chaotic character to its rise as the preeminent platform for participatory media. Having made itself available and suitable for a wide and relatively unrestricted range of uses, YouTube as a media institution has been co-created by the various institutions and individuals who have put it to use. Through YouTube’s openness and indeterminacy, Internet users have been offered an unprecedented opportunity for the sharing of cultural experience on a global scale.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=UwB7LATK89c

Burgess and Green undertook an investigation of YouTube’s common culture–the set of norms and practices that have emerged on the young platform. Their investigation began with the site’s most popular, most viewed video content. Roughly half of the content Burgess and Green surveyed were what they classified as “user-generated”, while approximately 42% were classified as “traditional media”  content.

The investigators found, however, that individual users were somewhat of a supermajority of the contributors (uploaders) of the site’s most popular content while traditional media institutions were a small minority of these contributors, suggesting that individual users contribute a substantial amount of the traditional media content. Burgess and Green’s investigation also showed that, while traditional video content was more often “favorited” by users than user-generated content, user-generated videos were more often discussed in text comments and response videos.

The most common type of user-generated content attracting discussion and other interactions on YouTube are video blogs, or “vlogs.” Vlogs are the nuclei of the YouTube community–the nodes in social network that has emerged on the platform. Vloggers participate in and facilitate spirited discussions, invite responses, and thereby draw outsiders into the community developing around them. In this way, YouTube’s vloggers have emerged as homegrown community leaders. The participatory and interactive nature of the culture thriving on YouTube, Dr. Burgess contends, reflects shifts in popular ideas about cultural citizenship, cultural literacy, and the public sphere.

Dr. Burgess challenged the law’s confused treatment of regular users of online content as the end of the consumption chain rather than the beginning of that chain. The view of YouTube as merely a distribution platform for video content is wholly inadequate. Many of the ways in which YouTube is actually being used pose a direct challenge to ideas about cultural production and consumption that currently dominate the law. For more detail, buy the book or read the related paper from QUT’s digital repository.