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C Y B E R L A W / E V I D E N C E/ T R U T H +++ W I K I 2006
Welcome to the Cyberlaw / Evidence +++ 2006 wiki. This is a wiki for a number of Berkman Center classes and projects (links in the navigation box to the left).
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eon's mission
to express truth with reverence for life, to lead in net education and research, to better govern ourselves and our planet.
Methods
- to express our argument for change in cybermedia
- to learn how the world works without loosing sight of being part of it
- to do amazing things.
The Future of the Berkman Center
5 May 2006
Mission: Our mission is to recognize, study, and engage the most difficult and fundamental problems of the digital age, and to share in their resolution in ways that advance the public interest.
Who we are: At the heart of the center is a core group of people: the faculty, William Fisher, Charles Nesson, John Palfrey, and Jonathan Zittrain; fellows past and present; a dedicated staff; a committed set of students; and advisors and supporters from outside academia.
Where we stand: We were founded by Charles Nesson in 1997 as the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard Law School. We were the first academic center of our kind, premised on the observation that what we sought to learn was not already recorded. We pioneered architectures to integrate Harvard’s work and teaching with the world at large, led sustained university-wide discussion of Harvard’s role in the digital world, chartered the first clinical program in cyberlaw, and brought a landmark copyright case before the Supreme Court. Today we have a global reputation for cutting-edge work involving the relationships among the Internet, law, and society. Currently our efforts are concentrated in three zones, united by the question of how the Internet can elicit the best from its users:
(a) How evolving legal systems and technologies affect the ways in which human knowledge is developed and disseminated. Some of our ongoing projects that fall into this large basket include: our exploration, funded by the Mellon Foundation, of the impact of copyright law upon scholarship; our analogous examination, funded by the Revson Foundation, of the impact of patent law on basic scientific research; our efforts, funded by the MacArthur Foundation, to build a Digital Media Exchange to pilot reform ideas developed in William Fisher’s book, Promises to Keep; and our involvement as counsel or amici curiae in several important cases (including Eldred v. Ashcroft, Intel v. Hamidi, MGM v. Grokster, and Luck’s v. Gonzales). Creative Commons, a nonprofit organization that offers flexible mass licensing options for creative work, was born at the Berkman Center, as was Chilling Effects, a project to identify the prevalence of legal pressures upon online users and Internet service providers before those threats become full-fledged cases.
(b) The relationship between the Internet and civic activity. Within this zone fall our high-profile comparative studies, funded by the Soros and MacArthur Foundations and realized through the OpenNet Initiative, of the ways in which governments throughout the world filter and monitor their citizens’ access to the Internet; our examination of the ways in which weblogs (“blogs”) and other novel forms of individual expression are changing the methods by which news is gathered, defined, and spread; our creation of “Global Voices Online,” a system for aggregating and disseminating the views expressed in blogs in other countries; and our studies of the impact of the Internet on political campaigns and elections.
(c) How technology and law could alter the fundamentals of organized education, improve the lives of poor and disadvantaged people, and contribute to the vitality of developing nations. We pursue this goal by building innovative open-source educational software (including the H20 learning platform); by developing and testing new courses and pedagogic methods (for example, in our ongoing Internet Law program); by contributing to the development of open-access methods of publishing scholarship; and by exploring the rehabilitative and empowering uses of information technologies amongst the people in whom the least hope or expectation has been placed, including those in prison.
The originality, quality, and renown of our past and present projects have enabled us to attract ever more generous financial support from foundations, corporations, and individuals – and ever more creative and committed participants from around the world. We have a strong “brand.” We have an extraordinary and well-rounded team of people. We will do our best to preserve both as we increase the ambit of our work.
Among the respects in which the Berkman Center is unusual is our willingness to participate actively in the shaping of the technological and legal environment we study. We provide advice to litigants, NGOs, and lawmakers – both in the United States and in other countries. We conceptualize and build systems for freely exchanging music, video, and other creative work while compensating authors and publishers. We help organize a cyberschool in Jamaica. And so forth. Our goal in all of these ventures is to understand and promote the public interest, apart from the interests of any particular faction or firm. How do we define “the public interest”? In our view, that phrase encompasses such ambitions as the efficient promotion and dissemination of informational products, distributive justice within the United States and globally, and the advancement of democracy, broadly defined. How these ideals can be applied and reconciled in a given technological context is, of course, a difficult question – and one on which the faculty and fellows associated with the Berkman Center often healthily disagree – but it is itself a question central to our inquiries. Our normative groundings are not dogmas, and our responsibility is to learn and to educate, not to preach.
Where we are going: We are currently in the process of expanding our field of operations in two dimensions. First, while our primary focus is and will remain the relationship between the Internet and the legal system, our inquiries are drawing us ever more deeply into other disciplines as well: computer science, economics, sociology, political theory, history, theories of education, even religion. To strengthen our work in those zones, we are collaborating more frequently with faculty, fellows, and students drawn from other schools within Harvard and from other universities.
Second, we have begun to examine aspects of digital environments other than the Internet. Examples include:
- How repositories and indexing systems for digital records of all sorts could be improved;
- How both the incentives for pharmaceutical R&D and the mechanisms for distributing the drugs that issue from that research could be improved;
- What privacy will come to mean in the future and how systems of group judgment and reputation-assignment will affect traditionally-embraced individual rights;
- What roles trademarks will play in our evolving global economies and cultures;
- How curricula and pedagogy in primary, secondary, and adult education can be revitalized through technology;
- The changing role and shape of the university, and of methodologies of scholarly inquiry.
Convinced that both of these trends should be continued, we recently sought authority to transform the Berkman Center from research center tied exclusively to the law school to a research center of Harvard University as a whole. President Summers, Provost Hyman, and Dean Kagan enthusiastically joined in granting the request. Their understanding and ours is that the Berkman Center will continue to be housed at Harvard Law School and led by law-school faculty. But, like the David Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies, it will also draw faculty from many other schools and will pursue projects involving many disciplines.
Acting on that authorization, we recruited as faculty affiliated with the center several senior scholars with strong interests in the Internet and in digital technologies more broadly:
- John Deighton (Brierly Professor of Business Administration, Harvard Business School)
- Mark Edwards (Professor of the History of Christianity and Associate Dean for Academic Affairs, Harvard Divinity School)
- Alex Keyssar (Stirling Professor of History and Social Policy, Kennedy School of Government)
- Stuart Shieber (Welch Professor of Computer Science, Division of Engineering and Applied Sciences)
We have also recently initiated projects that examine dimensions of digital technology other than law. Examples include:
- Conferences on “The Internet and Politics” (held last December in Oxford and next December in New Delhi), which bring together academics and activists to explore the impact of new technologies on political processes in the United States and abroad;
- A project entitled “Stop Badware” to pilot ideas developed in Jonathan Zittrain's forthcoming article and book on the Generative Internet, deploying a novel system for identifying – and enabling Internet users to protect themselves against – undesirable software circulating on the Internet;
- A conference on “Web Credibility,” which convened bloggers and traditional journalists to discuss ways of increasing Internet users’ abilities to assess the reliability of the material they find on the Internet;
- The upcoming “Beyond Broadcast” conference, which will explore how traditional public media can embrace new citizen media to offer more vital public service.
In the near future, we hope to strengthen this reconfigured Berkman Center in the following respects:
(1) Expand our existing Advisory Board and other mechanisms of outside contribution. We wish first to expand and activate the Board as a collective body, and then discuss with its members what other changes in our governance structure they would advise.
(2) Offer interdisciplinary courses. Several of the faculty who have recently joined our ranks are eager to collaborate with us in offering courses that explore the Internet and digital technologies more broadly from several angles. Such courses would be open to students from all parts of the university.
(3) Expand our connections with analogous centers located in other universities and countries. We currently work together with the Stanford Center for Internet and Society and the Oxford Internet Institute. We should deepen those ties and create more. Jointly taught courses (made possible by enhanced inter-school communications systems), joint conferences, and joint research projects are among the tools we should use more often, especially since some of our modes of research and expression are themselves novel – and of great interest to other institutions.
(4) Expand our embrace of technology and media by making the development and projection of ideas in text, audio, and video themselves cornerstones of our research paper. We already routinely webcast and disseminate recordings of our conferences and other events, but remain eager to amplify our efforts – and facilitate wider adoption of this system across the University.
(5) Explain, exemplify, and accomplish these extensions of our mission through a series of conferences within the University. Over the course of the next year, we hope to hold a series of one-day conferences with each of our fellow schools. For example, we might convene a meeting with interested faculty from the Divinity School to discuss “Divinity in the Age of the Internet.” We might then organize a similar meeting with representatives of the Division of Engineering and Applied Sciences within the Faculty of Arts & Sciences to discuss “Law, Language, and Code,” to be followed by similar conferences with each of the other schools of Harvard. Charlie Nesson has volunteered to lead this initiative.
Funding: The principal sources of the funds upon which the Berkman Center has been built were two extraordinarily generous bequests from members of the Berkman family: $2.9 million from Jack Berkman in 1997; and $3 million from Lillian Berkman in 2000. Our benefactors encouraged us to deploy the money in an entrepreneurial fashion, not simply subsisting from interest on endowment, and we have done so. Accordingly, we have built an international reputation that exceeds those of institutions many times our size – and have nearly exhausted those initial, priming gifts.
We do not lack financial support for our many individual projects. On the contrary, foundations and firms are supporting our work at an accelerating pace. For example, in 2005, we received the following grants and gifts: $3,800,000 from the MacArthur Foundation; $250,000 from Microsoft; $130,000 from the Revson Foundation; $125,000 from eBay; $125,000 from the Mellon Foundation; $100,000 from IBM and Oracle; $75,000 from the Omidyar Foundation; $45,000 from the Soros Foundation; and $45,000 from Gartner/G2 – for a total of $4,695,000. What we need, rather, is replenishment of our core funding – the money necessary to rent our physical space, pay our utilities, pay the salaries of our staff, continue our clinical program, and support our fellowship program. Most of our specific projects – as well as the brainstorming and collegial interactions that regularly generate new projects – depend upon the maintenance of this core.
The Berkman Center has had a spectacular run in its first decade. The entrepreneurial vision of its benefactors has infused everything the Center has undertaken, encouraging us to push the envelope of the questions we might ask, the methodologies we might adopt to answer them, and the audiences we might engage in doing so. Our trajectory over the next decade should be even steeper, as the issues we address become even larger and harder. We seek an endowment worthy of our mission.