Digital Media Project (DMP) Newsfeed

Welcome, Urs Gasser!

syoung — Wed, 04 Feb 2009 09:00:00 -0500

As the spring semester begins, the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University is delighted to officially welcome Professor of Law at the University of St. Gallen Dr. Urs Gasser into his new role as Berkman’s Executive Director.

We are thrilled with Urs’ arrival and confident that his vision and dedication ensure that Berkman's research agenda and platform will continue to thrive and evolve. Beyond his many scholarly achievements, Urs’ combination of familiar and fresh perspectives gives him the ideal blend to both comprehend what we do now, and to develop insights into where we go next as a University-wide research center.

When we first met Urs back in 2002, he was an LLM student at the Harvard Law School and already an accomplished scholar, having earned a JD and an SJD in Switzerland and having published extensively in information law and policy, including an award-winning book on the responsibility for information as a legal problem. He spent the next two years as a Research Fellow at Berkman, doing wonderful (and voluminous) work primarily on the Digital Media Project. During his tenure, Urs launched the Harvard-Yale-Cyberscholar Working Group and also co-taught Berkman's Internet & Society course at the Harvard Extension School with John Palfrey. We were supportive but sorry for Urs’ departure when he returned to the University of St. Gallen, where he was appointed as Swiss National Science Foundation Professor and launched the Research Center for Information Law. We resolved to leverage the new situation for increased transatlantic research and collaboration.

Once our most productive Research Fellow, Urs quickly became our most valued Faculty Fellow, who, during one extended period, averaged more than one trip per month to Cambridge. We labored jointly on a range of topics from digital institutions to interoperability to youth and technology, including the creation of the annual “Learning a Foreign Language” seminar, with Urs and John Palfrey's authorship of Born Digital being the most recent product. In addition to an aggressive research agenda and teaching responsibilities, Urs led the development and teaching of an innovative interdisciplinary Master’s program at his alma mater, established a close collaboration between St. Gallen and Fudan University, and was deeply involved in a strategic reorientation of the University of St. Gallen. This range of activities is indicative of Urs’ talents and embodies Berkman’s commitment to rigorous scholarship with impact, innovative and effective teaching and learning in a globalized world, and active and meaningful participation in the university community.

It was essential that we identify for the Executive Director role a colleague with Urs’ powerful mix of attributes in part because of the precedent set by John Palfrey during his six years as Executive Director. Last year, John was appointed Vice Dean, Library and Information Resources, at Harvard Law School. He remains a Berkman faculty co-director. (Managing Director Colin Maclay has carried the torch between John's departure and Urs' arrival.) The Berkman Center is deeply indebted to John for his invaluable leadership and service. He is largely responsible for the shape and prominence of the Center today.

Urs is a worthy successor. In his vision, experience, and extraordinary dedication, he is quite similar to John. All of us are confident of Urs' ability to guide us through these tumultuous financial times and to sustain our research and activism for years to come.

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More: This week's episode of Radio Berkman is a conversation with Urs about his new Berkman role.

Mike Doughty cuts through the noise

syoung — Fri, 02 May 2008 11:00:00 -0400

Photo: ChrisB in SEA, CC by-nc-nd

Charge up your mp3 player. As part of the Berkman Center’s ongoing tenth anniversary celebration, Berkman@10, we’re retrieving some multimedia classics from our past.

To date, we’ve: re-presented Lawrence Lessig’s fall 2000 debate with Jack Valenti; brought back Charles Nesson’s framing of IS2K7, University: Knowledge Beyond Authority; re-produced John Perry Barlow's reassesment of his 1994 essay on the economy of ideas; re-posed the question: Will the Internet draft the next president? and jumped back to Ethan Zuckerman's supercharged history of digital community.

This week, an audio-only treat for music makers and fans: Eric Hellweg's April 2005 "interactive interview" with Mike Doughty, former Soul Coughing frontman, on creativity, music, and technology. When we asked the Berkman Center community which moments from the past should be featured this spring as multimedia classics, there was unanimous enthusiasm for this interview, which kicked off Signal/Noise 2k5: Creative Revolution? with not only discussion, but also live demonstration, Doughty strumming away in the Ames Courtroom at an implausible morning hour.

In the context of the iTunes store's increasing success, with Napster dead and MGM v. Grokster underway, Doughty and Hellweg (alumnus of the first Signal or Noise? conference) turn the audience's eyes -- ears, rather -- to the promiscuity of pop chords, riffs as building blocks, the musician's vocation, the industry's future, and sampling and the law. The Q&A includes questions from Berkman Fellows Wendy Seltzer and Jake Shapiro (of PRX and Two Ton Shoe fame).

Without further ado...
download the mp3
(33:17, 15.3 MB).

A sampling of recent hits around music online:

The Daily Dish (3/20/08)
Business Week (3/20/08)
"The Royalty Scam" (3/22/08)
"8.5 GB of CC-Licensed Samples for the OLPC" (3/27/08)
Ars Technica (3/31/08)
Wired (4/1/08)

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Two weeks to go: The Berkman@10 conference and gala are approaching fast! We have spruced up the agenda, and the conference wiki is up and running. Registration is open, space is limited, reserve your seat now!

Podcasting Legal Guide: Rules for the Revolution

rtabasky — Sat, 22 Dec 2007 01:13:11 -0500

Purpose:

The purpose of this Guide is to provide you with a general roadmap of some of the legal issues specific to podcasting. EFF has produced a very practical and helpful guide for issues related to blogging generally (http://www.eff.org/bloggers/).

This Guide is not intended to duplicate efforts by EFF, and in many cases refers you to that guide for where crossover issues are addressed. Our goal is to complement EFF's Bloggers FAQ and address some of the standalone issues that are of primary relevance to podcasters, as opposed to bloggers.

Berkman Center and Gartner to Release Report Documenting Importance of Playlists to Music Industry

rfink — Thu, 08 Dec 2005 16:23:09 -0500

Cambridge, MA - The Berkman Center for Internet & Society and Gartner will release an industry report Tuesday, December 13, documenting the extent of peoples’ use of music playlists and how such use may influence future business models.

Drawing from an early-adopter survey conducted through Gartner, report co-authors Derek Slater, a Harvard senior and Berkman student fellow, and Mike McGuire, Gartner’s Research Director, find that consumer-to-consumer recommendation tools, like playlists, enable consumers to actively present their individual tastes to each other and are becoming increasingly common. According to survey results, nearly 20 percent of online music listeners reported listening to music via playlists at least five days a week and more than 25 percent of online music listeners listened to music via playlists 1-4 days a week.

Early-adopters’ current use of recommendation tools drives Slater and McGuire to predict that by 2010 twenty-five percent of online music store transactions will be driven directly from consumer-to-consumer taste-sharing applications, such as playlist publishing and ranking tools either built into online music stores or external sites.

“The struggle over music file sharing has unfortunately turned ‘sharing’ into a bad word,” says Derek Slater. “Whatever one thinks of illegal downloading, much can be gained from giving music fans a chance to share their musical tastes in a variety of ways.”

Slater and McGuire also cite the cultural benefits of recommendation tools. Survey results reveal that people who use playlists are exposed to a greater diversity of music, sometimes driving demand for music in back catalogues. Playlists also introduce music fans with similar tastes to one another, over time building and reinforcing an online community.

To obtain a copy of the embargoed report or to schedule interviews with the report’s co-authors, please contact Amanda Michel at the Berkman Center for Internet & Society: (617) 495-5236 / amichel@cyber.law.harvard.edu.