Lies, thievery, and the ethics of computer security experiments; Intellectual Property & Global Justice; OA Week

Cyberscholars Working Group

Wednesday, October 10, 7:00pm ET, Berkman Center for Internet & Society, 23 Everett St, 2nd Fl.

Colin Agur, PhD candidate at Columbia University and a Visiting Fellow at Yale Law School, will discuss "India's Mobile Phone Revolution: A Legislative History, 1994-present." Bodó Balázs, an economist, assistant professor, researcher at the Budapest University of Technology and Economics, will discuss "Set the fox to watch the geese: voluntary, bottom-up IP regimes in piratical file-sharing communities." J. Nathan Matias, MIT Center for Civic Media, will discuss "Data Science for Gender Equality in the News." RSVP Required. more information on our website>

DPLA Midwest Conference

October 11-12, Chicago Public Library, Chicago, IL. Sessions on October 12th will be webcast live.

DPLA Midwest—taking place on October 11-12, 2012 in Chicago—is the third major public event bringing together librarians, technologists, creators, students, government leaders, and others interested in building a Digital Public Library of America. Convened by the DPLA Secretariat at the Berkman Center for Internet & Society and co-hosted by the Chicago Public Library, the event will assemble a wide range of stakeholders in a broad, open forum to facilitate innovation, collaboration, and connections across the DPLA effort. more information on our website>

Yo ho, yo ho, a researcher’s life for me: Lies, thievery, and the ethics of computer security experiments

Monday, October 15, 12:00pm ET, Maxwell Dworkin 119. This event is hosted by the Center for Research on Computation and Society and co-sponsored by the Berkman Center.

The study of human behavior as it relates to secure has raised numerous ethical dilemmas. Should researchers be allowed to analyze databases of stolen passwords made public through others’ criminal acts? Should researchers who identify compromised computers by spammers allow these computers to remain compromised in order to monitor how often people buy products from spammers? Should researchers deceive participants and expose them to ruses indistinguishable from criminal attacks in order to determine how effective these attacks might be? Stuart Schechter researches computer security, human behavior, and occasionally missteps in such distant topics as computer architecture and, now, research ethics. more information on our website>

From Goods to a Good Life: Intellectual Property and Global Justice

Tuesday, October 16, 12:30pm ET, Harvard Law School. This event will be webcast live.

Most scholarship on intellectual property considers this law from the standpoint of law and economics. Under this conventional wisdom, intellectual property is simply a tool for promoting innovative products, from iPods to R2D2. In this highly original book, Madhavi Sunder calls for a richer understanding of intellectual property law’s effects on social and cultural life. Intellectual property does more than incentivize the production of more goods. This law fundamentally affects the ability of citizens to live a good life. Intellectual property law governs the abilities of human beings to make and share culture, and to profit from this enterprise in a global Knowledge economy. This book turns to social and cultural theory to more fully explore the deep connections between cultural production and human freedom. Madhavi Sunder is a Professor of Law at UC Davis School of Law, and is a leading scholar of law and culture. RSVP Required. more information on our website>

How to Make Your Research Open Access (Whether You're at Harvard or Not)

Tuesday, October 23, 12:30pm ET, Harvard Law School. This event will be webcast live.

How do you make your own work open access (OA)? The question comes up from researchers at schools with good OA policies (like Harvard and MIT) and at schools with no OA policies at all. We invite you to join Peter Suber and Stuart Shieber of the Harvard Open Access Project, the Berkman Center community, and Office for Scholarly Communication in an open forum on the Harvard OA policies, concrete steps for making your work OA, and questions on any aspect of OA, especially from the perspective of publishing researchers. Peter Suber's work consists of research, writing, organizing, advocacy, and pro bono consulting for open access to research. He is the Director of the Harvard Open Access Project, Special Advisor to the Harvard Office for Scholarly Communication, Faculty Fellow at the Berkman Center, Senior Researcher at SPARC, Research Professor of Philosophy at Earlham College, Open Access Project Director at Public Knowledge, and author of the SPARC Open Access Newsletter. Stuart Shieber is James O. Welch, Jr. and Virginia B. Welch Professor of Computer Science in the School of Engineering and Applied Sciences in the Faculty of Arts and Sciences at Harvard University. RSVP Required. more information on our website>

RB207: Hacking Censorship (Drone Humanitarianism I)

The Internet exists and persists on the border between helpful and harmful, between freedom and totalitarianism, access to knowledge and censorship. But as long as technology is adaptable activists will be learning and creating workarounds to spread information and promote change. Enter the Circumvention Tools Hackfest, a four-day bonanza of coders and freedom lovers gathered together to build and improve applications to help activists in repressive regimes get around censorship and surveillance. Correspondent Becky Kazansky attended the Hackfest to find out what kind of tools these "hackers" cooked up. As part of our new series — Drone Humanitiarianism: Harnessing Technology to Remotely Solve and Prevent Crisis — she filed this report. video/audio on our website>