In Turkey this past week, the discussion revolved in large measure around a law passed in May, 2007, called 5651. It is this law that the Transportation and Telecommunications Ministry is charged with implementing, including Internet filtering. Translation credits to Turkish lawyers: ELIG, Attorneys-at-Law. LAW ON REGULATION OF BROADCASTS VIA INTERNET AND PREVENTION OF CRIMES … Read more
From Turkey, talking to lots of people about the future of Internet filtering, I’m struck by the value of a broad, public debate about what kind of a network we want the Internet to become over time. There are decisions, made on a daily basis, by dozens of states around the world, that affect the … Read more
These are heady days for the study of Internet and its relationship to the practice of politics and the struggles over democratic decision-making. Three stories — in China, in Iran, and throughout the Arabic-speaking world — make a powerful case for the deepening relevance of the use of new technologies by citizens to the balance … Read more
The people of Turkey are facing a stark choice: will they continue to have a mostly free and open Internet, or will they join the two dozen states around the world that filter the content that their citizens see? Over the past two days, I’ve been here in Turkey to talk about our new book … Read more
At the Berkman Center’s lunch speaker series, Gary Kebbel of the Knight Foundation is with us today. I’m not sure that I’ve ever seen such a public, open discussion by a program officer of a foundation about how they do their work in funding great projects. The Knight Foundation has been running the News Challenge … Read more
One of the themes of Born Digital, the book Urs Gasser and I are working on, is excitement around the possibility of an emerging global culture of young people who use technology in particular ways. (We’re equally interested in the problems of those who may be left out of that emerging culture, too, as Ethan … Read more
Rep. Tom Lantos has called on Yahoo! executives to return to Congress to talk about what they knew and when in the Shi Tao case. Rep. Lantos alleges that Yahoo!’s general counsel misled a hearing (at which I and others submitted testimony, too) in 2006 by indicating that the company knew less than it actually … Read more
Three recent conversations I’ve been part of offered a contrast in styles and views on intellectual property rights across the Atlantic. First, the Fordham International IP conference, which Prof. Hugh Hanson puts on each year (in New York, NY, USA); the terrific classes in Law and Economics of Intellectual Property that Prof. Urs Gasser teaches … Read more
Professor Mary Wong of Franklin Pierce Law Center is here today at the Berkman Center. Mary’s talk is a series of provocations about language. She’s taking on the trope of the individual author. She is of the “dualist school,” that there’s a minor, but existing solution to do more with natural rights-type reasoning than the … Read more
As with Jim Moore’s video — now famous thanks to Cory Doctorow at Boing Boing — you can decide for yourself whether Viacom’s cease-and-desist letter should have resulted in Jaegercat’s video being taken down at YouTube. In an e-mail from .sg, (which she said I could republish), Jaegercat writes: “My video ‘Beat Police’, an original … Read more