At the Berkman Center, we are hearing a preview of key elements of Prof. Julie Cohen‘s forthcoming book, Configuring the Networked Self. Some hasty live-blog notes follow: Prof. Cohen tells us that there are two disconnects that she starts with: 1) there are lots of invocations of “freedom” being floated around, but many of the … Read more
The Supreme Court says: “08-448 CABLE NEWS NETWORK, INC., ET AL. V. CSC HOLDINGS, INC., ET AL.: The petition for a writ of certiorari is denied. The Chief Justice and Justice Alito took no part in the consideration or decision of this petition.” (The Solicitor General wrote a terrific brief urging the Court to take … Read more
The United States Solicitor General’s office has filed its brief (posted online here) in the long-running RS-DVR matter, popularly referred to as the “Cablevision” case. The brief is terrific. The United States takes the position that the Supreme Court should not review the case, which had been decided unanimously by the Second Circuit in favor … Read more
Brad Turcotte, known on the web as BradSucks, came to our Web Difference class today. The topic for class is his model for making, sharing, and getting paid for his music. He seems to do everything BUT the traditional label approach. He gives it away directly, with a tip jar; he’s big on Magnatune; you … Read more
RightsAgent Verification
Hip-hip-hooray for Creative Commons on its fifth birthday today! Thanks to Larry, Joichi, and all the heroes of a free culture who have worked so hard on CC, around the world, for the past half-decade. If you want to help, there’s still time to pitch in: CC is $470,000 of the way toward $500,000 in … Read more
We have the great pleasure today at the Berkman Center of hearing from Eszter Hargittai, a prof at Northwestern, on her large-scale research project on how 18 / 19-year-olds use digital technologies. She’s also worked on problems related to what she calls the “second-level digital divide” over the past decade or so. She surveyed over … Read more
There’s enormous promise in the Open Library project, which we’re hearing about today at Berkman’s lunch event from Aaron Swartz. The idea is wonderfully simple: to create a single web page per book. That web page can aggregate lots of data and metadata about each book. In turn, the database can be structured to indicate … Read more
I am curious to see how long Facebook leaves this app up after this WSJ article. Scrabulous, a Facebook app made by third-party developers, is an obvious knock-off of Scrabble. One might reasonably raise copyright and trademark issues related to it (perhaps the Scrabulous developers could withstand these complaints; query as to Facebook’s willingness to … Read more
HLS clinical student Angela Kang and fellow (and prof.) Wendy Seltzer produced the first-ever installment of Berkman.TV, as part of MediaBerkman. The topic: the Coop book controversy and the copyright issues involved.