Berkman Center for Internet & Society

Stanford Law School today announced the appointment of Phillip Malone as professor of law and director of the new Juelsgaard Intellectual Property and Innovation Clinic of the Mills Legal Clinic. Malone will join Stanford in July 2013 from the Harvard Law School, where he is currently clinical professor of law and the director of the Cyberlaw Clinic at the Berkman Center for Internet & Society.

William W. Fisher III, a professor at Harvard Law School, has been experimenting with ways to split the difference. This spring, Fisher is teaching his first online course, CopyrightX, through edX. But he’s also a casual student of the medium. Fisher’s field is intellectual-property law—he was among those to represent Shepard Fairey and his “Hope” poster—and he works a lot on rights in the digital age. I met him one morning in his office, which had a standing desk and an ergonomic keyboard in one corner. At one point, Fisher’s Portuguese water dog, Nica, wandered in. He explained to me that he has reservations about MOOCs.

Harvard Law School has announced the appointment of Urs Gasser LL.M. ’03, executive director of the Berkman Center for Internet & Society, as a Professor of Practice.

Jonathan Zittrain, Professor of Internet Law at Harvard University, thinks that one solution would be to create a new type of “mesh network” – where phones find a way to connect to each other when regular connections go down. Apps could be built in these networks, which allow civilians with resources that connect with and help others.

Regular contributor and Harvard Law professor Jonathan Zittrain joins Marketplace Tech host David Brancaccio to explain his take on drones and their unintended consequences.

Telecom regulators don’t usually have public followings, except perhaps among other telecom regulators. But as soon as rumors began circulating that Julius Genachowski planned to resign as chairman of the Federal Communications Commission FCC, petitions appeared on sites like BoingBoing, Reddit, and Daily Kos calling on President Barack Obama to appoint a 50-year-old law professor and former administration official named Susan Crawford as Genachowski’s successor. It’s not hard to see why she has acquired an enthusiastic fan base in these precincts of the Internet. With an appealing blend of earnestness and feistiness, Crawford is set on turning the sorry state of broadband and wireless services in the United States into the biggest populist outrage since Elizabeth Warren went after the banks.

When The Associated Press appeared to tweet Tuesday that there were two explosions in the White House, we were right to believe the news, even though it turns out that the AP Twitter account had been hacked. There were no explosions; the tweet was false. But believing the AP is not where we went wrong. Our occasional believing false reports should awaken us to the dangers of literalism.

Kit Walsh, a lawyer at the Cyberlaw Clinic, says that challenging that particular patent is not really about chocolate, but about the idea that chocolate is just another material that can be melted and later solidified into new shapes. “If you let people get patents on every material that has those properties, you’re going to occupy 3D printing,” he said over the phone from Cambridge, MA.

To Judith Donath, a faculty fellow at Harvard Law School’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society, Friday’s regional lockdown had one clear result: the creation of a widespread, unified community during an event that, not too long ago, would have left many feeling alone, isolated, and more than a little worried.

Like many of us, and especially those of us staying off the streets of Boston, I’ve been not knowing things all day. That’s because I’ve been watching the mainstream media as well as my favorite social media. It turns out that not knowing something reveals its own kind of truth.