Technology and the Public Interest

Books, essays, and commentary from John Palfrey

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Commentary from John Palfrey

  • (Sort of) Open Hearing on Open Documents on Monday

    On Monday, Oct. 31, the Massachusetts State House will be home to a bound-to-be-lively hearing on the Commonwealth’s recent move to support OpenDocument Format in the state’s procurement of software.  I wrote to ask the relevenat Senator’s office if the Berkman Center could come and record the session for podcasting.  After a few hours, we got a response…

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  • Entrust the net to the universities?

    Nesson: “Trust the net to the great universities of the world. Lead the universities to grow strong in cyberspace. Make them repositories of the value of connection, portals of access to and ability to contribute to a global common wealth of knowledge. Just as with the growth of the proprietary domain in the last chapter…

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  • Kenn Cukier on patents in The Economist

    The edition of The Economist on the newstands (Oct. 22 – 28, 2005) has an extensive section — 18 pp. of the print version — on patents and technology, written by Kenneth Cukier.  Must-reading for anyone interested in the future of information technologies, open source, licensing, and intellectual property law.  Cukier tracks the growth of…

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  • McGraw Hill et al. sue Google

    Lawsuit filed today on the Google libraries project, with extraordinary counsel (no doubt) on both sides.  The publishers assert copyright violation by Google for re-publishing digital versions of their copyrighted works that are kept in libraries such as the University of Michigan’s.

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  • Tim Bray: Beware the Splogs!

    Yikes.  This is bad.

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  • David Berlind on MA, MSFT, and open standards

    David Berlind, exec editor at ZDNet, has a first-class piece of journalism on the fairly dramatic recent doings in Massachusetts on ODF and related issues.  Our involvement in these matters is largely through our work with the Open ePolicy Group, through which we developed a Roadmap on adopting open standards.

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  • The Problems of Filtering

    Yesterday, we at the OpenNet Initiative (a collaboration of Berkman/HLS with the Advanced Network Research Group of the Cambridge Security Programme at University of Cambridge, where Rafal Rohozinski is the principal, and the Citizen Lab at University of Toronto, where Ron Deibert is the principal) released a report on Internet filtering in Myanmar (Burma).  The NYT’s Tom…

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  • Urs Gasser's view of the State of Play

    We’re here at the State of Play III, a sold-out, electric event at NYLS of which the Berkman Center is a co-host.  For a lawyer’s context in a few easy paragraphs, check out what my colleague Urs Gasser has to say about it, as he prepared to attend.  If you are not here in NY,…

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  • Give to Creative Commons

    CC needs you to donate — and not just your time, this time.  Jamie Boyle writes: “We have had incredible success, both in the number of our licenses being used (Yahoo reports 50 million link backs, though that is an imprecise measure ) and in the quality and importance of the material licensed.  (From MIT’s…

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  • New open access journal: Digital Watch

    Julian Aiken and a group University of Pittsburgh graduates and graduate students are launching a new open access journal, Digital Watch, for library scientists.  From their About: “Digital Watch is an Open Access online academic journal, which has been created by graduate students in the University of Pittsburgh School of Information Sciences to offer a forum for…

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  • Michael Geist In the Public Interest

    Prof. Geist has released “In the Public Interest,” a compilation of 19 essays on Canada’s copyright struggles as a new round of copyright reform gets underway.  “As Canada embarks on a new round of digital copyright reform, this collection of 19 essays from Canada’s leading copyright experts provides context and analysis of the latest reform…

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  • The US control of the Internet"

    So, the United States is mad that the EU and others want to reduce the US control over the domain name system, as exercised through a contract between the US Department of Commerce and ICANN.  I agree wholeheartedly that the system of management of the DNS, which has worked well at a technical level, is…

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