Berkman Buzz: Week of March 31, 2008

April 04, 2008

BERKMAN BUZZ:  A look at the past week's online Berkman conversations.  If you'd like to receive this by email, just sign up here. The Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard Law School

Week of March 31, 2008

Special Reminder: One week left to submit nominations for the first Berkman Awards! The awards will be presented to people or institutions that have made a significant contribution to the Internet and its impact on society over the past decade. The primary awardee will receive $50,000! Please spread the word.  The nomination form and more information available at http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/events/berkmanat10/awards

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What's going on...take your pick or browse below.

*Derek Bambauer discusses the Roommates.com ruling
*Ethan Zuckerman talks about Tunisian video activism on BoingBoing
*Boy, is T-Mobile's face magenta. Sam Bayard explains
*Mike Linksvayer looks at CC licensed specification
*David Weinberger liveblogs from Topic Maps in Oslo
*Doc Searls has computer will travel.  If only the descent, free internet service would follow
*Weekly Global Voices: "What more must Zimbabweans do?"
*Weekly Berkman@10: "New York City Berkman Book Release: The Future of the Internet--And How to Stop It"

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"The Ninth Circuit has just ruled (en banc) that the Roommates.com Web site is not entitled to immunity under Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act. (Props to Eric Goldman for the link!) The opinion, by Chief Judge Alex Kozinski, is typically lucid and holds, essentially, that Roommates falls outside the safe harbor because it creates (or at least induces the creation of) some of the content on the site. I see two fun aspects to the ruling on first read: its implications for Web developers (and business models!) and its implications for statutory interpretation..."
Derek Bambauer, "Ninth Circuit Rules Roommates.com May Be Unlawful Host"

"At ETech, a few weeks back, I had the pleasure of doing a video interview with Xeni Jardin. Xeni’s one of my very favorite journalists, in part because she’s passionate about both technology and the developing world - she’s travelled and reported extensively in Latin America and West Africa, and frequently brings topics up on BoingBoing that might not otherwise be included on a tech/pop culture/intellectual property/DIY blog..."
Ethan Zuckerman, "Tunisian video activists on BoingBoing" 

"I was sure that this was an April Fool's joke. But alas, it's true. Deutsche Telekom, the parent company of T-Mobile, sent Engadget a letter a few weeks ago, requesting that the popular tech blog stop using the color magenta in the logo for its Engadget Mobile news blog. Here are the two logos side-by-side (courtesy of Engadget)..."
Sam Bayard, "T-Mobile Asks Engadget to Stop Using the Color Magenta

"Proto-lawyer, GNOME hacker and CC friend Luis Villa’s brief 'CC-licensed specification' rant is correct: '[I]mplementing a spec may require (among other things) licensing of “pending utility and design patent claims, copyrights, trade dress and trademark rights.” Putting a specification under a CC license gives you a copyright license to the text of the specification; it does not give license to the necessary trademarks, or to the patents, and depending on the license chosen, may not even give you the right to make a derivative work […]' Fortunately all such specifications I’m aware of are published under free CC licenses (or placed in the public domain) so that derivative works and commercial use are legal..."
Mike Linksvayer, "What good is a CC licensed specification?"

"Alex Wright is keynoting the Topic Maps conference in Oslo. [I’m live blogging, getting things wrong, etc.]  Europe has been thinking about organizing information for a long, long time, he says. He goes basck to Thomas Aquinas who thought the two pillars of memory: Association and order. He likens 'memory palaces' to topic maps. [Hmm. The associations weren’t topical, as I understand them.] He fast-forwards to Charles Cutter who invented a book cataloging system and foresaw in 1883 the day when clicking on a reference would retrieve the object. [Cutter numbers are routinely added to Dewey Decimal numbers in library catalogs.] ..."
David Weinberger, "[topicmaps] Alex Wright"

"I upload a lot of photos. It’s almost always an ordeal unless I’m at home or work. That’s because I get fast upload speeds in both places. At home I have a fiber connection to the Net with 20Mb symmetrical service — a rare and good thing. I don’t know the upstream speed at work, but it’s plenty fast enough and it always works. When I hit the road, though, it’s aarg all the way..."
Doc Searls, "Getting airports and hotels out of the pay toilet business"

"What more must Zimbabweans do? This question was posted at This is Zimbabwe blog. Bev Clark, blogging at Kubatana blog responds, “…a helluva lot.” Bev argues that unseating a dictator does not only take place through an electoral process: 'It does not, and in fact we’ve tried that a few times. Sure there needs to be an election to expose - what is so clearly being exposed - the work of Rigger Mugabe. But it doesn’t end there...'"
Ndesanjo Macha, "What more must Zimbabweans do?"

"Please join the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard Law School, Susan Crawford, Visiting Professor at Yale Law School, Jeffrey Cunard and Bruce Keller, partners at Debevoise & Plimpton LLP, and Big Think for a discussion featuring Professor Jonathan Zittrain previewing his book The Future of the Internet -- And How to Stop It..."
Berkman@10, "New York City Berkman Book Release: The Future of the Internet--And How to Stop It"

Join us May 15-16 for what promises to be a unique gathering of Internet luminaries, cyberlawyers, entrepreneurs, activists, geeks, media makers and journalists, students, and more. The Berkman@10 Conference offers a chance to reflect critically on the last ten years of the development of the Internet and to look ahead to the crucial questions we face in the next ten years of cyberspace.
Register at here