Technology and the Public Interest

Books, essays, and commentary from John Palfrey

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Commentary from John Palfrey

  • Book Experiment #1: Intellectual Property Strategy as an iPad App (or, reply to Cody Brown)

    With big thanks to MIT Press and a terrific group of colleagues, I’m delighted to report that the iPad app version of my new book, Intellectual Property Strategy, is now approved and available in the App Store.  (To find it, click here or search on “Intellectual Property Strategy” within the App Store on your iPad.)…

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  • SOPA and our 2010 Circumvention Study

    Daniel Castro of The Information Technology  & Innovation Fund recently published a paper supporting the Stop Online Privacy Act (SOPA) currently being debated in congress.  In that report, he claims that research performed by us supports the domain name system (DNS) filtering mechanisms mandated by SOPA.  This claim is a distortion of our work.  We…

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  • Bibliotheca Class Final Projects Presentations

    We had a final session of our Bibliotheca class today at Harvard’s Graduate School of Design, which I am co-teaching with Jeffrey Schnapp. We used the time to explore the final projects of each of the students, some alone and some in groups.  As a group, they are terrific, ranging from proposals to redesign and…

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  • William Rawn Associates, Architects come to Bibliotheca Class (as do David Lamberth, Matthew Sheehy, and Michael Barker)

    We are just thrilled to have William Rawn and his colleague Cliff Gayley of William Rawn Associates in our Bibliotheca class (which I’m co-teaching with Jeffrey Schnapp) at Harvard’s Graduate School of Design this morning.  They’ve designed the Cambridge Public Library’s main building, as well as the Rochester Public Library.  They are also discussing two…

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  • Intellectual Property Strategy: Book Launch

    I’m excited to be launching a new book, Intellectual Property Strategy, tonight at Harvard Law School.  (If you’re in Cambridge, MA, USA, please feel free to come by Austin Hall East at HLS at 6:00 pm this evening for the event and a reception thereafter or tune into the webcast.) The discussion tonight will cover…

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  • Bibliotheca Class, and Learning and Teaching at Harvard

    I’m having a huge amount of fun teaching a class at the Harvard Graduate School of Design with my friend Jeffrey Schnapp on the history, present, and future of libraries, called Bibliotheca.  The students are fantastic: twenty or so, mostly studying design and architecture, though there are graduate students in other fields.  We’re holding the…

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  • Hard Questions for #iLaw2011's Freedom of Information/Arab Spring Sessions

    We’ve revived the iLaw program after a five-year hiatus. This year, it’s an experiment in teaching at Harvard Law School: part class (for about 125 students) and part conference (with friends from around the world here for the week). And JZ has taken the baton from Terry Fisher as our iLaw Chair.  An exciting day.…

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  • Future of Law Libraries: The Future is Now?

    A group of us is gathered today at Harvard Law School for a conversation about the future of legal information, libraries, and the law itself.  It’s a fun and diverse group — about 150 strong — in Austin Hall’s north classroom.  The wiki for the conference has the schedule, the participants, and a lot of…

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  • Weblogs@Harvard after Eight Years

    More often that you might think, we get asked about how the Weblogs@Harvard project (the server on which this blog appears) got started and why we at the Berkman Center maintain it.  I got several questions about it in the context of an event this week, in fact, eight years or so into the project. …

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  • Digital Public Library of America, Session IV

    These are my live-blog notes for the fourth and final full session at the DPLA content and scope working session: 1) The messy issue of rights and permissions for in-copyright works is the biggest issue that the DPLA will face.  (We have a workstream set up for legal issues on the wiki.)  A variant of…

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  • Digital Public Library of America, Session III

    Here are some quick notes on three take-aways from Session III at the Content and Scope planning meeting of the Digital Public Library of America. 1) Materials that are in copyright will have to be thought about by the DPLA differently (the red zone) from those in the public domain (green) or orphan works and…

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  • Digital Public Library of America, Session II

    My three take-away points/topics from the second session, focusing on characteristics of public domain collections and open business models: 1) We have done a lot of work toward collection-building in a DPLA.  We need to learn from the experience of our own projects in the United States and those of others that are underway today. …

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