Wednesday, May 5, 6:00 pm - 8:30 pm
Conference Room 202, Berkman Center
23 Everett St 2nd Floor, Cambridge, MA
Refreshments provided
Jeffrey Warren: Grassroots Mapping Projects
Jeffrey Warren will present the Grassroots Mapping Project and Cartagen, a set of tools for mapping, enabling users to view and configure live streams of geographic data in a dynamic, personally relevant way. These tools helps users to analyze and view collected and shared geographic and temporal data from multiple sources. The framework uses vector-based, context-sensitive drawing methods to describe data, not merely in terms of lines and polygons, but also with adaptive use of color, movement, and projection. Applications include mapping real-time air pollution, citizen reporting, and disaster response.
Jeff Warren designs mapping tools and visual environments in the Design Ecology group of the MIT Media Lab and is a fellow at the Center for Future Civic Media at MIT. He created Cartagen, an open- source system for reporting and displaying geodata in real time. http://unterbahn.com/ http://grassrootsmapping.org/ http://cartagen.org/
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Nicholas Bramble: A Diverse and Antagonistic Information Age?
The First Amendment "rests on the assumption that the widest possible dissemination of information from diverse and antagonistic sources is essential to the welfare of the public." AP v. US, 326 U.S. 1, 20 (1945). This principle of "diverse and antagonistic sources," which will turn 65 years old in June, has become one of the most frequently cited and axiomatic Supreme Court statements in cases regarding media regulation. My talk examines the compatibility of traditional conceptions of the First Amendment with new and unexpected mechanisms for representing and promoting the public’s interest in "diversity of political discourse, unique opportunities for cultural development, and myriad avenues for intellectual activity." I am interested both in the government's role in setting up safe harbors along the lines of DMCA § 512 and CDA § 230—which seem to represent a shift from disseminating information to promoting the cultivation and agricultural stewardship of information and applications from distributed sources—and the possibility of treating platforms such as the social graph as basic infrastructure. However, if these safe harbors and other related regulations are premised on a layers-based architecture where the underlying layers of a network are conduits for user-driven communications and applications, then what happens when both users and network/platform providers assert speech rights in the network? How do we assess the relative speech and information value of these competing First Amendment claims, and how should we balance public and private regulatory tools in shaping the open-ended infrastructure of the Internet?
Nicholas Bramble is a postdoctoral fellow in law at Yale Law School and a resident fellow at the Yale Information Society Project.
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David Abrams: YouTube's Copyright Downfall
David Abrams has analysed at ChillingEffects.Org the problems associated with the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) takedown procedures at the margins of fair use and over-inclusive takedowns caused by automated copyright management systems. In particular David is interested in how the DMCA can be tweaked to encourage copyright holders to tend toward under-inclusiveness rather than over-inclusiveness at these margins. David discusses some of the policies and technology that YouTube has for managing copyright infringements based on recent takedowns and information contained in the summary judgment motions from the Viacom v. YouTube trial.
David Abrams received bachelors and masters degrees in electrical engineering from MIT. He spent 10 years designing instrumentation before co-founding a software company in 1988. He and his partners sold the company in 2001 and David left in 2002 to go to law school. After graduating from Harvard Law School in 2005, David worked as an Intellectual Property litigator before spending three years clerking for Judge Zobel. In 2008 he returned to Harvard Law Schoolas as program director for the new problem solving course and as a fellow at the Berkman Center.
More Chilling than the DMCA - Automated Takedowns: http://www.chillingeffects.org/weather.cgi?WeatherID=634