Wednesday, October 10, 7:00 pm
Berkman Center for Internet & Society, 23 Everett St, 2nd Fl, Cambridge, MA
RSVP Required via the form below

"India's Mobile Phone Revolution: A Legislative History, 1994-present"
Colin Agur, Columbia University and Yale Information Society Project
ca2393@columbia.edu

In less than two decades, India's telephone mobile phone market has grown from less than 2 million to more than 700 million phones. This transformation could not have happened without a new government that challenged old assumptions about the telephone as a luxury good reserved for the rich, and new policies that emphasized mass telecommunications and mobile connectivity. This talk explores the key pieces of legislation passed by the Indian government from the mid-to-late 1990s onward, describes the challenges and scandals that ensued, and concludes with thoughts about telecom's new role in Indian governance.

Colin Agur is a PhD candidate at Columbia University and a Visiting Fellow at Yale Law School. His dissertation examines mobile telecommunications policy in India.

Website: http://www.law.yale.edu/intellectuallife/13677.htm

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"Set the fox to watch the geese: voluntary, bottom-up IP regimes in piratical file-sharing communities"
Bodó Balázs, Budapest University of Technology and Economics, Fellow @ Harvard University, Berkman Center for Internet and Society
bodo@mokk.bme.hu

A complex system of rules and governance mechanisms control the lives of piratical P2P file-sharing darknets and ensure the survival and the quality of the shared P2P resource pool. Surprisingly, some pirate communities seem to have some kind of an Intellectual Property protection regime as well. To begin with, I show three different examples of voluntary intellectual property (IP) enforcement in piratical file-sharing communities. I demonstrate that though the emergence of such norms may sound counter-intuitive, they are in fact logical consequences in the development of the underground file-sharing scene. I then move to discuss whether or not the long-term consolidation of such norms is harmonious with the default ethical vision of copyright. Here I show that current practices in the IP field are scattered in both the legal and the ethical dimensions, and stable (social, business) practices consolidate not according to their legality but according to whether they comply with the default ethical vision. Finally I suggest that voluntary IP regimes can be effective enforcement mechanisms that rights-holders should begin experiment with.

Bodó Balázs in an economist, assistant professor, researcher at the Budapest University of Technology and Economics. He is a Fulbright Fellow at Harvard's Berkman Center for Internet and Society. He is the project lead for Creative Commons Hungary and a member of the National Copyright Expert Group. His academic interests include copyright and economics, piracy, media regulation, peer-to-peer communities, underground libraries, digital archives, informal media economies. His most recent book is on the role of P2P piracy in the Hungarian cultural ecosystem.

Websites: http://www.warsystems.hu/, http://mokk.bme.hu/

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"Data Science for Gender Equality in the News"
J. Nathan Matias, MIT Center for Civic Media (@natematias)

Can high resolution data and innovative technology help us create better representation of women in the news? Over the next year, I'm applying large-scale analytics technologies to measure gender inequality in the media over long-term and realtime news datasets. In this talk, I'll share some initial results and visualisations. I'll also discuss theories of change for newsrooms, advocacy organisations, and public engagement.

J. Nathan Matias develops technologies for media analytics, community information, and creative learning as a research assistant the MIT Center for Civic Media. Before MIT, Nathan worked in UK startups, developing technologies used by millions of people worldwide. He also helped start the Ministry of Stories, a creative writing center in East London. Nathan was a Davies-Jackson Scholar at the University of Cambridge from 2006-2008 and is a current Fellow at the UK Royal Society of Arts. Follow him at @natematias or his blog.