Wednesday, May 5, 6:00 pm - 8:30 pm
Conference Room 202, Berkman Center
23 Everett St 2nd Floor, Cambridge, MA
Please RSVP to Herkko Hietanen at hietanen@cyber.law.harvard.edu before 5/3/10
Refreshments provided
Jeffrey Warren: Grassroots Mapping Projects
Jeffrey Warren will present the Grassroots Mapping Project and
Cartagen, a set of tools for mapping, enabling users to view and
configure live streams of geographic data in a dynamic, personally
relevant way. These tools helps users to analyze and view collected and
shared geographic and temporal data from multiple sources. The
framework uses vector-based, context-sensitive drawing methods to
describe data, not merely in terms of lines and polygons, but also with
adaptive use of color, movement, and projection. Applications include
mapping real-time air pollution, citizen reporting, and disaster
response.
Jeff Warren designs mapping tools and visual environments in the Design
Ecology group of the MIT Media Lab and is a fellow at the Center for
Future Civic Media at MIT. He created Cartagen, an open- source system
for reporting and displaying geodata in real time.
http://unterbahn.com/ http://grassrootsmapping.org/ http://cartagen.org/
**
Nicholas Bramble: A Diverse and Antagonistic Information Age?
The First Amendment "rests on the assumption that the widest possible
dissemination of information from diverse and antagonistic sources is
essential to the welfare of the public." AP v. US, 326 U.S. 1, 20
(1945). This principle of "diverse and antagonistic sources," which
will turn 65 years old in June, has become one of the most frequently
cited and axiomatic Supreme Court statements in cases regarding media
regulation. My talk examines the compatibility of traditional
conceptions of the First Amendment with new and unexpected mechanisms
for representing and promoting the public’s interest in "diversity of
political discourse, unique opportunities for cultural development, and
myriad avenues for intellectual activity." I am interested both in the
government's role in setting up safe harbors along the lines of DMCA §
512 and CDA § 230—which seem to represent a shift from disseminating
information to promoting the cultivation and agricultural stewardship
of information and applications from distributed sources—and the
possibility of treating platforms such as the social graph as basic
infrastructure. However, if these safe harbors and other related
regulations are premised on a layers-based architecture where the
underlying layers of a network are conduits for user-driven
communications and applications, then what happens when both users and
network/platform providers assert speech rights in the network? How do
we assess the relative speech and information value of these competing
First Amendment claims, and how should we balance public and private
regulatory tools in shaping the open-ended infrastructure of the
Internet?
Nicholas Bramble is a postdoctoral fellow in law at Yale Law School and
a resident fellow at the Yale Information Society Project.
**
David Abrams: YouTube's Copyright Downfall
David Abrams has analysed at ChillingEffects.Org the problems
associated with the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) takedown
procedures at the margins of fair use and over-inclusive takedowns
caused by automated copyright management systems. In particular David
is interested in how the DMCA can be tweaked to encourage copyright
holders to tend toward under-inclusiveness rather than
over-inclusiveness at these margins. David discusses some of the policies and technology that YouTube has
for managing copyright infringements based on recent takedowns and
information contained in the summary judgment motions from the Viacom
v. YouTube trial.
David Abrams received bachelors and masters degrees in electrical
engineering from MIT. He spent 10 years designing instrumentation
before co-founding a software company in 1988. He and his partners sold
the company in 2001 and David left in 2002 to go to law school. After
graduating from Harvard Law School in 2005, David worked as an
Intellectual Property litigator before spending three years clerking
for Judge Zobel. In 2008 he returned to Harvard Law Schoolas as program director for the new
problem solving course and as a fellow at the Berkman Center.
More Chilling than the DMCA - Automated Takedowns: http://www.chillingeffects.org/weather.cgi?WeatherID=634
Last updated April 28, 2010