Berkman Buzz: Week of July 14, 2008

July 18, 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 University

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*Jonathan Zittrain thinks about the potential for an "iPatriot Act"
*Wendy Seltzer discusses eBay v. Tiffany
*Persephone Miel looks at how Vendor Relationship Management can be applied to public media
*Ethan Zuckerman explores some of the challenges of Science Commons
*The Internet and Democracy Project discusses possible surveillance in Botswana
*Weekly Global Voices: "African bloggers react to ICC charges against Sudanese President al-Bashir"
*Weekly Publius Essay: "Michael Barrett: Cybercrime - and what we will have to do if we want to get it under control"

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The full buzz.

"Will there be an ‘i9/11′, and second, will it prompt an ‘iPatriot Act’? The actual chances of a catastrophic network failure are pretty slim. But were one to occur, it would probably look a lot like the attacks on the DNS root servers in 2007. Here’s what happened: The 13 Domain Name System (DNS) root servers record who controls the Top-Level Domains (’.com’, ‘.edu’, ‘.uk’, and so forth) and where. This file of information is quite small, and very few computers actually have to call upon the root servers to find the sites they’re looking for. But without them, the single Internet we’re used to would fracture, and computers would have no easy, reliable way to find the IP addresses they’re looking for..."
From Jonathan Zittrain's blogpost, "The Future of the ‘iPatriot Act’"

"In Tiffany v. eBay, decided today, the Southern District of New York gives helpful bounds to secondary liability for trademark infringement, saying eBay is not liable for its use of the term “Tiffany” nor for its sellers’ sales of counterfeit goods. Judge Sullivan’s careful analysis leaves the path clear for online marketplaces to flourish, putting enforcement burdens, where they belong, on trademark claimants..."
From Wendy Seltzer's blogpost, "eBay Shines in Tiffany Trademark Fight"

"We want to support the programs we love. We want to support the people who might produce programs we might love in the future. We don’t want to save public broadcast stations just because they are transmitters that used to be the only way we could get these shows, but we do want to support stations that create and support communities. We want to be able to donate money for podcasts, individual shows and stations. We want to do this in ITunes and on the IPhone and in other places too. We want to support stations to produce shows we don’t care about, because other people might be interested in them..."
From Persephone Miel's blogpost, "Can VRM save Public Broadcasting?"

"What about scientists?  That’s the research interest of my colleague Melanie Dulong de Rosnay. She’s using her time as a Berkman fellow to study alternative copyright systems and their usage and relavence within academic and library communities. Yesterday, Melanie presented research on the licensing of scientific databases and the obstacles such licensing presents to collaboration between scientists around the world..."
From Ethan Zuckerman's blogpost, "The complexity of sharing scientific databases"

"Fear and unease have spread throughout Botswana this past week, over suspicion of possible government surveillance. On Wednesday, the Botswana Telecommunications Authority (BTA) stated its plans to continue mandating the registration of all pre-paid sim-cards as a security procedure. According to BTA Chief Executive Officer Thari Pheko, all unregistered lines will be cut off by the first of the year, 2010..."
From the Internet & Democracy Project blogpost, "Unease over Sim-card Registration Policy in Botswana"

"Bloggers from around the world are reacting to the International Criminal Court's recent recommendation that Sudanese President Omar Hassan al-Bashir be charged with multiple counts of genocide, war crimes and crimes against humanity. Many of those bloggers are criticizing the potential indictments, claiming they are difficult to enforce and that they will bring more unrest to an already unstable nation...'"
From Rebekah Heacock's blogpost for Global Voices, "African bloggers react to ICC

"How many Internet users are there today? Conservative estimates exceed one billion people. In a decade and a half we have gone from minimal Internet usage to approximately 20% of the world’s population now being online. Moreover, the bulk of that growth has occurred since the year 2000. In this essay, I will explore two themes: first, how societies adopt new technologies and second, how governance and regulation may co-evolve with new technologies. I’ll use two historical examples – the road system and airplanes – to ask what lessons they may provide for the Internet..."
From Michael Barrett's essay for the Publius Project, "Cybercrime - and what we will have to do if we want to get it under control"