According to Fisher, 4,100 people applied to take “Copyright,” which is the first and only edX class to have a fixed enrollment. Fisher and his teaching fellows selected 500 students for the 12-week course.
via Law School Debuts First Online Course | The Harvard Crimson.
“Forty years ago, a hacker was someone who took great joy in knowing everything about computers,” said Susan P. Crawford, a professor at the Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law at Yeshiva University. “The word was really used in admiration. Now it is used to describe and condemn both professional cyberattackers and amateurs who are swept together within the broad description of the word.”
via Disruptions: A Fuzzy and Shifting Line Between Hacker and Criminal – NYTimes.com.
“It takes me roughly a week to prepare each lecture,” Fisher said. “I’ve lectured on these topics for decades. Preparing one for this setting turns out to be hard.”
To get there, the federal government needs to pursue three goals. First, it must remove barriers to investment in local fiber networks. Republican and Democratic mayors around the country are rightly jealous of the new, Google-built fiber network in Kansas City, Mo., which is luring start-ups from across the country. And yet in nearly 20 states, laws sponsored by incumbent network operators have raised barriers for cities wanting to foster competitive networks.
via How to Get High-Speed Internet to All Americans – NYTimes.com.
Dr. danah boyd: Media connects people to information and, when its interactive, to each other. The key is to leverage media — and its connection-making processes — to reach people where theyre at and to help gel them to each other and to relevant information when theyre open to making those connections. Peoples needs, attitudes, and mindset shift depending on where theyre at — lifestage, demographics, etc. But the key is to not approach media — and especially not social media — as a one-size-fits-all process.
via Philanthropy NYU :: Interviews :: Dr. danah boyd: Social Media Engagement.
On Dec. 6-8, 2012, the Berkman Center for Internet & Society, together with seven international co-organizers, hosted a symposium at Harvard Law School titled Internet-Driven Developments: Structural Changes and Tipping Points, convening representatives from Internet and society research centers spanning 5 continents and 22 countries.
Based on a workshop taught for the first time last spring by Professor Jonathan Zittrain ’95 and John Palfrey ’01, the class presents students with several case studies and asks them to complete team exercises, which include conducting negotiations, writing legal briefs, and drafting policies and legislation. Readings prepare the students to carry out the exercises, while lectures and Q&A sessions with guest speakers help summarize and solidify the concepts.
via In a hands-on workshop, students use case studies to explore information law and policy.
Should broadband Internet service be treated as a basic utility in the United States, like electricity, water, and traditional telephone service? That’s the question at the heart of an important and provocative new book by Susan Crawford, a tech policy expert and professor at Cardozo Law School. In Captive Audience: The Telecom Industry and Monopoly in the New Guilded Age, released Tuesday by Yale University Press, Crawford argues that the Internet has replaced traditional phone service as the most essential communications utility in the country, and is now as important as electricity was 100 years ago.
via Is Broadband Internet Access a Public Utility? | TIME.com.
The anti-SOPA protest started with discussions on blogs and elsewhere, according to Harvard’s Mr Benkler, whose research team has analysed the content of online publications and links between activist websites.
via The new politics of the internet: Everything is connected | The Economist.
The DPLA, once built and at scale, can help libraries, archives, and museums in ways that we can foresee and in ways that we can’t, today. The DPLA can help bring materials to people through public, academic, and special libraries. The DPLA can also free up time for librarians to spend more time directly helping people. The DPLA can provide access to code and applications that will do extraordinary things for people through libraries. And the DPLA is already providing an open source platform on which others are developing exciting new applications that will help people in ways we can’t predict today—which is the true promise of a generative platform, much like the web itself.
via What the DPLA Can Mean for Libraries – The Digital Shift.