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 April 7, 2008

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

*Jake Shapiro has some BIG NEWS about PRX!
*The Internet & Democracy project released a case study on the Iranian Blogosphere
*Sarah Zhang discusses schools and Internet speech on the Digital Natives blog
*Wendy Seltzer spells out the copyright issues surrounding Scabulous
*Erica George looks at behavioral targeting
*John Palfrey writes a very meta blogpost
*Weekly Global Voices: "India: Tibet, the Olympic Torch and the Dalai Lama"
*Weekly Berkman@10: "John Perry Barlow looking back on an Internet decade"

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"This is big. The MacArthur Foundation has selected PRX as one of its 2008 recipients of the MacArthur Award for Creative and Effective Institutions. 'Public Radio Exchange (PRX)/Station Resource Group – Cambridge, Massachusetts: By gathering and distributing new programming and using technological innovation to expand content choices, PRX is leading public radio to become more interactive, diverse, and participatory.'..."
Jake Shapiro: "PRX gets MacArthur Award!"

"As covered in Sunday’s New York Times by Neil MacFarquhar, the Internet and Democracy project is pleased to release “Mapping Iran’s Online Public: Politics and Culture in the Persian Blogosphere”, the latest in a series of case studies aimed at understanding the Internet’s impact on the public sphere around the world..."
The Internet & Democracy Project: "Release of Iran Blogosphere Case Study"

"Astute readers will probably have noticed that although we’re supported by Harvard Law School’s Berkman Center, Digital Natives has more of a sociological rather than legal bent. Not that these two spheres are disparate, of course, as this post will hopefully demonstrate. Another one of the great projects affiliated with the Berkman is the Citizen Media Law Project (CLMP), which offers legal guidance to people creating digital media. Here, I’d like to take a look into the CMLP’s Legal Threats database and examine a few representative cases most relevant to Digital Natives: schools and Internet speech..."
Digital Natives: "Schools on Internet Speech"

"The New York Times reports that RealNetworks has introduced an “authorized” version of “Scrabble by Mattel” to Facebook, in an effort to compete with the enormously popular Scrabulous. CNet is puzzled, in part because the 'official' app is unavailable in the United States or Canada. For those not yet hooked, Scrabulous has been providing a Facebook application that lets Facebook friends play the game of Scrabble online. If the game numbers increment sequentially, it has served more than 2 and a half million games, and claims 629,256 daily active users..."
Wendy Seltzer: "Scrabbling for Legal Rationalism: No Copyright for Games"

"The New York Times this weekend featured an editorial by Adam Cohen on erosions of user privacy caused by commercial behavioral tracking. While behavioral tracking (primarily through the use of cookies attached to web pages or to display ads) is not inherently bad, it’s important that companies employing tracking properly disclose what they’re doing in their privacy policies and user agreements..."
Erica George: "Behavioral targeting and user privacy" 

"One of the great treats of co-teaching with David Weinberger is getting to be a student on the days that he leads discussion. Today, we’re taking up blogging, something he knows a thing or two about. You can also follow along with the class notes on The Web Difference class blog. A few of the issues that drew heat, and a bit of light..."
John Palfrey: "Live-blogging Class on Blogging"

"In this week's roundup of virtual India we look at Tibet in India. Next week the Olympic torch arrives in India. First, Indian footballer Bhaichung Bhutia pulled out, and now Supercop Kiran Bedi has pulled out. However, well-known Indian cricketer Sachin Tendulkar will be carrying the Olympic torch writes enga. area and adds...'"
Global Voices: "India: Tibet, the Olympic Torch and the Dalai Lama"

"In February 2004, Nesson aurally annotated an interview with John Perry Barlow, “Looking Back on an Internet Decade.” The occasion was the tenth anniversary of Barlow’s 'shot heard ‘round the world' -- not A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, but his earlier The Economy of Ideas: A framework for patents and copyrights in the Digital Age. As Ben Walker, long-time affiliate and friend of Berkman, questions Barlow on the shifting fortunes of this seminal Wired essay, Nesson weaves in comments and context for assessing the legacy and future of an idea of intellectual property as intrinsically different from physical property..."
Berkman@10: "John Perry Barlow looking back on an Internet decade"

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 here.