Technology and the Public Interest
Books, essays, and commentary from John Palfrey
Essays
Notes from AI Action Summit in Delhi, India, February 2026
Reflections on AI, governance, and the public interest from the AI Action Summit in Delhi.
Read essayConcord Free Public Library 150th Anniversary Celebration
Remarks on libraries, civic institutions, and the enduring importance of public knowledge.
Read essayInvesting in the Arts—in Chicago and Beyond
Thoughts on philanthropy, culture, and why investing in the arts matters for public life.
Read essayCommentary from John Palfrey
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As if Diebold folding weren't enough…
Dave Winer spoke at Stanford Law School’s CIS‘s lunch series yesterday — a successful presentation from all reports. Dave apparently was very convincing. Word is that every SLS student entering next year will be offered a weblog, says Prof. Lessig. We have good reason to believe that they’re not the only one about to roll out such…
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Diebold folds
A huge victory for EFF, Stanford’s CIS, those famous Swarthmore students, our own Derek Slater — and frankly everyone who is interested in the principles behind the First Amendment — as Diebold has filed with the court to indicate that it wishes at this point neither to sue those who posted the e-voting-related documents on the Web nor to pursue further the DMCA…
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Op-Ed on the DMCA, the Diebold matter, and universities
The Harvard Crimson ran an op-ed I wrote about the Diebold matter. The focus is on Derek Slater’s story here at Harvard, but it’s meant also to talk about the awful position in which universities are placed by this law. How is a university supposed to choose between thinking of itself as an ISP and…
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Kucinich on Diebold
I’m so impressed that Cong./Presidential Candidate Kucinich is linking to various Diebold-related materials from his house.gov site — now that’s political speech. (Thanks to Prof. Lessig, new esq. Dan and, before both of them, to The Great Donna for pointers and ongoing coverage.) Huge kudos also to Cong. Kucinich for his call for hearings — with…
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BlogAfrica
Ethan Zuckerman, along with various other Berkman fellows and students and others, has just kicked off an initiative to encourage blogging in Africa. Ethan and Andrew McLaughlin are headed to Accra, Ghana, in January to kick it off in person. Dave Winer‘s in on the action as well. Ory Okolloh is taking it to Kenya. …
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Eugene Volokh on Crime-Facilitating Speech
“People have generally overstated the impact of the Patriot Act,” Prof. Eugene Volokh just told us in his talk as part of the Berkman Center speaker series. Though provocative, his views on the Patriot Act are not at the core of what he is saying today. Prof. Volokh, who teaches law at UCLA and a…
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Federal anti-spam bill passes House
There’s a lot more unpacking to do before we understand the full potential impact of the CAN-SPAM Act (of 2003?) that just passed the House (having passed the Senate previously, by unanimous vote). One of the most obviously relevant elements, off the bat: the fact that the bill says it pre-empts the 30-some state laws…
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Supporting Derek Slater
Derek Slater, a Berkman Center researcher, achieved a victory today when Harvard’s general counsel’s office told him that they would not hold against him, for the purposes of its Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) policy, his posting on the campus network certain information with respect to voting machines. In response to a “cease and desist” letter…
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Is relative news coverage among countries a legal issue?
Ethan Zuckerman is talking about his work on Global Attention Profile (GAP) today in Digital Democracy class at HLS. The GAP is, in part, “a portrait of a news media outlet’s attention to various nations. GAP software automatically crawls a news media outlet’s website and calculates country-by-country story counts over a period of time. This…
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Fryderyk Zoll on standard terms in European commercial law
We have the pleasure of Prof. Fryderyk Zoll‘s company at the Berkman Center at Harvard Law School this morning. Prof. Zoll’s visit has been arranged by Filip Wejman, an LLM student here. Prof. Zoll is speaking about standard contract terms in the EU. His discussion picks up the conversation we started in Class 2.1: Online…
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Clever Andrew
You can’t tell me that Andrew McLaughlin isn’t a funny guy. I particularly like his perhaps-un-PC-but-still-amusing “hostage” version.
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Evan Burnstein on the MIT Library Access to Music Project
Evan Burnstein of the Cyberlaw and the Global Economy class at HLS is asking a hard question about technology and the law. He’s focused on MIT’s “Library Access to Music Project” and is interested in knowing which is the dog and which is the tail: technology or the law. (The Boston Globe, New York Times, Frank Field, and…


