Cyberscholar Working Group at Columbia
February 21, 2014 at 4PM
Columbia University School of International and Public Affairs, 13th Floor
Arnold A. Saltzman Institute of War and Peace Studies - 420 West 118th Street, Ste. 1336
New York, NY 10027
Room: Saltzman Suite, 13th floor, 1336
The Cyberscholar Working Group is a forum for fellows and affiliates of MIT, Yale Law School Information Society Project, Columbia University, and the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University to discuss their ongoing research. Each session is focused on the peer review and discussion of current projects submitted by a presenter. Meeting alternatively at Harvard, MIT, Yale, the working group aims to expand the shared knowledge of young scholars by bringing together these preeminent centers of thought on issues confronting the information age. Discussion sessions are designed to facilitate advancements in the individual research of presenters and in turn encourage exposure among the participants to the multi-disciplinary features of the issues addressed by their own work.
This month's presentations include:
(1) Old Ideas: BBSs and the Emergence of Online Communities in India
The Internet arrived in India in 1988 through a joint Government of India-UNDP project named 'Education and Research Network' (ERNET). Access was limited to researchers at ten elite academic and research institutions and a few ERNET staff. The Indian public, especially the computer enthusiasts, were left starved of access to network technology. It was under these limiting circumstances that Bulletin Board Systems (BBSs) first made their appearance in India in 1989, thanks to a few pioneers.
Computer enthusiasts whetted their appetites by flocking to these new BBSs. In doing so they created an online eco-system that would mirror current social networks in sheer enthusiasm, participation, variety, and range of topics. There was even a women-only BBS.
These early BBSs in India are interesting and important for several reasons. First, unlike the U.S. and other advanced countries, India's BBSs followed the arrival of the Internet, rather than preceded it. Second, BBS pioneers had to overcome restrictive government technology policies, under which even 1200-baud modems were unavailable - a victim to import restrictions (in some cases, users had to smuggle modems into the country using ingenious methods). Third, telephone connections were extremely restricted (typical wait times for a connection being six years), often forcing BBS 'sysops' to use a single phone line for residential as well as BBS use. Fourth, even with a telephone connection and a modem, it was illegal to connect the two without cumbersome permissions from the Department of Electronics. Fifth, the sysops had to run their BBSs on old, indigenous PCs with little memory and non-standard versions of DOS.
However, the Indian BBS pioneers found ingenious workarounds to these impediments, and their BBSs played an important role in fostering vibrant online communities which remained unrivaled until 1995 (when public Internet was finally available). The BBSs were a platform for online communication, collaboration, discussion and learning. They were repositories for hundreds of downloadable software files and utilities. Interestingly, even those with ERNET connections used these BBSs to learn about computer networks, write shell programs, and use UNIX commands.
The thriving BBSs of the 1990s demonstrate a deep historical continuity to today's thriving social networks in India. This paper extends Jason Scott's history of BBSs to document India's early experience with BBSs. It is a compelling story of political economy, technology policy, access to basic technologies such as telephone and modems, and intrepid self-styled "geeks" driven to create networked communities.
Ramesh Subramanian (B.Sc. in Applied Sciences, 1980, Madras University, India; P.G. Honors Dip. in Management, 1984, XLRI, India; M.B.A., 1990 and Ph.D., 1992, Rutgers University) is a Visiting ISP Fellow at the Yale Law School, and the Gabriel Ferrucci Professor of Computer Information Systems at the School of Business, Quinnipiac University, Connecticut. Subramanian's current research interests include Information Systems Security, History of Technology, ICT4D, Technology and Privacy Policy. At Yale ISP, he will continue his research and lead sessions in these topics. Subramanian's articles have appeared in peer-reviewed journals such as the European Business Review, Journal of Global Information Technology Management, International Journal of E-Business Research, Information Systems Education Journal, and Communications of the International Information Management Association, and as chapters in scholarly books. The book Computer Security, Privacy and Politics: Current Issues, Challenges and Solutions Ed. Subramanian, was published in 2008 by IRM Press. The book Peer-to-Peer Computing: The Evolution of a Disruptive Technology, Eds. Subramanian and Goodman, was published in 2005 by IDEA Group Publishing, Hershey, PA. In 2008-2009, Subramanian was awarded a Fulbright Senior Researcher grant to study the effects and consequences of Internet spread in rural India.
Prior to joining Quinnipiac University, Subramanian worked at IBM Advanced Technology Lab as Senior Software Engineer. He was the project lead for the development of a new-generation collaboration tool, which has since become the IBM Community Tools Suite. He was also the project lead for the development of an intra-company P2P resource sharing prototype code-named "Mesh," and holds two U.S. patents in these areas. Prior to IBM, Subramanian has held the following positions: Associate Professor of MIS (tenured), College of Business and Public Policy, University of Alaska, Anchorage; Instructor of Computer Science, Rutgers University, NJ; Member of the Technical Staff (MTS), Database Research District, Bell Communications Research, Morristown, NJ; Consultant, Anchorage Chamber of Commerce; Consultant, British Petroleum Exploration, Anchorage, Alaska.
(2) Rethinking Technology-Neutral Laws: A Case Study in Copyright
Copyright law has a long and complicated relationship with technology. At the same time copyright is technology's child, technology has the habit of knocking copyright law out of alignment. Yet, technological disruptions extends far beyond copyright to numerous other areas of the law, including patent, telecommunications, and surveillance. In the face of increasingly rapid technological advances, legislators and scholars have adopted the nearly unquestioned principle that laws should be technology neutral. That is, a law should apply evenly to specific circumstances regardless of the technology in which those circumstances arise.
This Article challenges the conventional wisdom through an in-depth evaluation of the costs and benefits that technology neutrality has imposed on the copyright system. Specifically, this Article shows how copyright law's shift to technology neutrality failed to "future-proof" copyright law as Congress expected. Worse, the broader granting of rights via technology neutrality has resulted in numerous judicial carveouts from copyright liability that contribute to copyright law's increasing complexity. This Article explains why technology neutrality has behaved counterintuitively by demonstrating that neutrality has been misunderstood as a flexible standard when, in fact, it is an overinclusive rule. Re-situating technology neutrality on the rules-standards spectrum also helps illuminate unappreciated normative considerations in choosing technology-neutral or -specific provisions in and beyond copyright law.
Brad A. Greenberg is Intellectual Property Fellow at the Kernochan Center for Law, Media and the Arts, Columbia Law School. He is a graduate of UCLA School of Law, where he served as Editor-in-Chief of the UCLA Entertainment Law Review. His research focuses on intellectual property and media law, and recent publications include "Copyright Trolls and Presumptively Fair Uses," 85 U. Colo. L. Rev. 53 (2014); "The Federal Media Shield Folly," 91 Wash. U. L. Rev. 437 (2013); and "More Than Just a Formality: Instant Authorship and Copyright's Opt-Out Future in the Digital Age," 59 UCLA L. Rev. 1028 (2012).
(3) Lawmaking under Duress: The Curious Case of Privacy as a Positive Externality of Techno-utopianism
Privacy is often portrayed as a luxury, as the intellectual preoccupation of nerdy privileged liberals, and an issue of salience only to the elite. This ignores the reality of the most marginalized sections of a society being disproportionately impacted by privacy intrusive technologies. The collusion of public and private agendas towards implementing large welfare projects is generally seen as progressive and neutral, yet the consequences of even well-intentioned efforts that trade privacy for convenience, welfare, security or a host of other compelling goals is troubling. The use of biometric technologies further complicates matters: the assumption that bodies can be rendered into infallible verifiers, as repositories of unchanging truth, is not without its catalogue of failures. This talk will examine the discourse around biometric representations in India, the possibility that failures are endemic to their functioning, and the implications of systemic errors on equality, participation and democracy. These themes will be explored in the context of certain large government databases including the Unique Identity project, and recent efforts to craft a privacy law to fill the legal vacuum in which these schemes are being implemented.
Malavika Jayaram is a Fellow at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard, focusing on privacy, identity and free expression, especially in the context of India's biometric ID project. A Fellow at the Centre for Internet and Society, Bangalore, she is the author of the India chapter for the Data Protection & Privacy volume in the Getting the Deal Done series.
She is one of 10 Indian lawyers in The International Who's Who of Internet e-Commerce & Data Protection Lawyers directory. In August 2013, she was voted one of India's leading lawyers - one of only 8 women to be featured in the "40 under 45" survey conducted by Law Business Research, London. In a different life, she spent 8 years in London, practicing law with global law firm Allen & Overy in the Communications, Media & Technology group, and as VP and Technology Counsel at Citigroup. During 2012-2013, She was a Visiting Scholar at the Annenberg School for Communication, University of Pennsylvania.