Law + Economics of Cyberspace at University of St. Gallen

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Today and tomorrow, I’m up on a hill in an eastern canton of Switzerland, teaching a two-day course on cyberlaw to graduate students at the University of St. Gallen with our friend and colleague Urs Gasser. The format is a good one: a framework for each of the eight, two-hour (!) classes by the prof, and then student papers presented for the balance of the time, plus discussion.

The first up is a student giving quite a nice paper on privacy-enhancing technologies and their relationship to e-commerce. She is emphasizing the broad lack of awareness of privacy-endangering aspects of life online; the series of technologies and legal remedies to which users have access; and the curious, or unfortunate, fact that Internet users have not widely adopted privacy-enhancing technologies, in Europe and elsewhere. So, should the state step in to ensure that we look after our own online data privacy, absent users helping themselves?

A social norm, separating Switzerland and the United States: at the end of a student presentation, I was the only one clapping. Everyone else: rapping on the table. A cool, maybe better, sound.

Benkler's The Wealth of Networks in podcast form

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Yochai Benkler’s recent lecture at HLS, a “very concise version” of the key arguments of his new book, The Wealth of Networks, is available in the form of a must-listen podcast at AudioBerkman (41:22; the book, at 500 pages, takes much longer — and is worth it.)
Also around Berkman today: a pre-meeting for One Web Day, organized by fellow David Isenberg, friend/prof Susan Crawford, et al. at 7:00 p.m. tonight in Harvard Square’s John Harvard’s Brewhouse.

And word has it that Beyond Broadcast may be about to sell out? Pretty cool. If you plan to come, sign up fast!

Presidential signing statements v. the veto

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Powerful op-ed in the New York Times about the fact that President Bush has yet to veto a single bill, instead relying upon 750 “Presidential signing statements” to argue that he does not have to enforce the laws that Congress passes (with props to a Boston Globe article by Charlie Savage that made this case). Among the many things not to like about a presidency, this one is pretty far up the list.

Computing and education

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I’m in the computer room at a grand old hotel in New Paltz, NY, the Mohonk Mountain House, fretting about what to say to a group of school business managers gathered here under the banner of the NYSAIS. I’m here to talk about computing and education. (At the Berkman Center, this topic is one of our three core thematic areas of inquiry, along with Internet & content issues like IP and Internet & democracy. Charlie Nesson, JZ, and Colin Maclay do a much better job than I do in keeping this issue in the foreground of our work.)

The best part about attending a similar event last Fall was meeting several inspiring and insightful teachers. Some of them not only blog themselves, but think hard and well about computing and teaching. One of those teachers is Arvind Grover, whose blog I was scanning by way of research for some of those inspired thoughts I recall him having. For one, he thinks that “We need to be training our students to be problems solvers, not fact-repeaters. I advocate for computer science starting lower school and going all the way through college. The effect of technology on the world has been dramatic and it continues. … If your school does not have a computer science program, you must ask yourself why not? If your school does have a computer science program, you must ask yourself is it the right one?” He refers us to a ComputerWorld article on the future of computer science.

I agree. But I’m also puzzling over another, related question. If you are teaching today’s Digital Natives but not using technology to do so, why not? And if you are, what’s your purpose in doing so? You may well have a good reason NOT to use computing in any way in the teaching process. A professor at Harvard Law School, Elizabeth Warren, makes a compelling case about how she teaches using the Socratic method and the extent to which that method is about a highly focused, person-to-person exchange in the classroom (and associated benefits to onlookers who are not looking at IMs and smirking about what someone just sent them). Absent a specific pedagogical reason of this sort — and there are many — I think any educator, at any level, has to ask themselves if they are in fact engaging students in the digital environment in which a large percentage of their students immerse themselves. It does not mean everyone has to teach computing, or the law of computing, or some off-shoot of it. But I do think that it’s becoming increasingly important to join the issue in schools of all levels. What is your strategy for using computing as part of the teaching and learning process? If you ignore computing, are you effectively preparing your students for where they head next? Are you engaging them where they are right now? Are you, and your students, contributing to the emerging digital commons of shared knowledge? And are you making the most of your community’s digital identity? Charlie Nesson asks, “What’s your cyberstrategy?”  The answer might be no, or I don’t have one, or I don’t care, but failing to ask the questions strikes me as the big potential mistake.

Digital Institutions at Berkman today

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John Clippinger, Oliver Goodenough, and company have brought the question of the future of digital institutions to the Berkman Center today. We’ve been visited by old friends — David Johnson, Urs Gasser, Judith Donath — as well as distinguished neighbors from elsewhere at Harvard — including Prof. Viktor Mayer-Schonberger and Prof. Joseph Nye, former dean of the Kennedy School. Prof. Nye is up on his MySpace, Second Life, among other digital bona fides. This gathering is the latest in the collaborations between the Berkman Center and the Gruter Institute. We welcome others to participate in this ongoing set of conversations about the digital identity metasystem and how it relates to big themes like trust, accountability, governance on the Internet, and the like.

A free, legal guide for podcasters

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One of the questions we get all the time is: “how do I know what’s legal and illegal when I’m podcasting?” It’s one of those questions that can make a lawyer cringe, because you either 1) spend the rest of the cocktail party trying to give a decent answer or 2) you have to say it’s too complicated and the person should hire a lawyer.

So, a better answer: check out the hot-off-the-press Podcasting Legal Guide — not legal advice, exactly, but a wonderful text with answers to most questions, prepared through a joint initiative of Creative Commons (especially their terrific GC, Mia Garlick) and the law clinics at the Stanford Center for Internet & Society and the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard Law School.

Maturation of blogging

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This morning, we are hosting an eminent group of academics here at Harvard Law School for a symposium on blogging and legal scholarship. Prof. Paul Caron is leading off right now. You can tune in to the webcast, if you are not local to Cambridge. (If you needed any further incentive to watch, Prof. Michael Froomkin promises to announce a new project just after 11:00 a.m.)

Meanwhile, a Maine blogger has been sued for $1 million for blog posts critical of the advertising campaign of a state agency in Maine. The Boston Globe reports: “Warren Kremer Paino Advertising LLC, an agency hired by the Maine Department of Tourism, filed suit in US District Court in Maine last week, alleging the blogger, Lance Dutson of Searsmont, Maine, outside Camden, violated the agency’s copyright and defamed the agency in blog entries self-published at www.mainewebreport.com.” My view is that a lawsuit of this sort should have to clear a very high bar before a court awards damages to the design firm, especially where the core discussion is a matter of political speech in which a citizen is commenting on the activities of a state agency of his home state.

And, today, we are releasing a brand-new blogs server at Harvard Law, running a new instantiation of WordPress. It reminds me of the heady days when Dave Winer, back in Christmas Break 2002, first joined us at the Berkman Center and pulled us all into this business as the pied piper of citizen-generated media here at Harvard. Core to Dave’s blogging initiative here was to put up the first-ever community blogs server at a university.

I am reminded of an article that the Harvard Gazette published back in 2003, in the early days of the initiative. I think it’s safe, now, to say that this blogging initiative has been a big, maybe even unqualified, success — with several hundred members of the Harvard community blogging, whether on our server or otherwise; a vibrant group whose (completely open set of) members still meet every Thursday night at the Berkman Center; the first series of podcasts and extensions of that tradition; and so forth. Come a long way, since then, with lots of great people picking up the legacy and extending it, like all those working on Global Voices. Thanks, Dave.

Benkler mini-lecture at HLS

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Prof. Yochai Benkler is making the argument(s) of his new book, The Wealth of Networks, (500+ pages; buy it or write about it),
in 30 minutes here in Hauser 102 at HLS.  Whew — a lot of big
ideas, and big words, in a short space.  He is considering two
large problems.

1) What are the stable changes in the production of human knowledge and information?

– Commons-based production: the key is production without exclusion.

– Peer-production: large-scale cooperation among human contributors
without price signals or managerial commands.  Free and open
source software is hard to argue with, because it’s succeeded in the
marketplace.  But the phenomenon of peer production is in fact
ubiquitous.

– Most critical shift in terms of new opportunities: new platforms for
self-expression and collaboration.  People are trying to make
money from getting the point that platforms for self-expression can be
powerful: that’s what Web 2.0 is.

– IBM makes more in revenues from Linux-related activities than from patent revenues.

– These changes are a challenge to incumbent business models. 
These changes are threatened by IP laws and other funky new technology
laws.

2) And on to the politics: why should we care about the outcome of these political debates?

– Three reasons to care: autonomy (more we can do ourselves, or in
loose collaboration with others — see David Weinberger, Project Gutenberg), justice and
development, and democracy.

– There is no major democratic state that doesn’t post-date the rise of
mass media.  What does democracy look like when we introduce
social production?  Pentagon Paper is an early and important
example.  Diebold is a new one, in the lead-up to the 2004
election is
another, with Bev Harris and her distributed friends.  (Read the
book!)

David Weinberger, inspired by Yochai Benkler's book tour visit

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Yale Law School Prof. Yochai Benkler is here at Berkman for the day as
part of his book tour for The Wealth of Networks.  At fellows’
hour, prompted by a back-and-forth about whether Cass Sunstein was
right in his famous Republic.com argument (about the Daily Me), David
Weinberger took issue with the idea that we should read or listen to
those with whom we disagree.  “I do not,” he said, “have an open
mind.  It would take the Rapture to convince me that Bush was
right.”  One for the quote wall.

John Clippinger says that it’s really about structuring different kinds
of conversations, not necessarily about eating our spinach and
listening to
[fill-in-the-blank-radio-shock-jock] with whom one disagrees.