I School Podcast

Julie Cohen came and gave a talk at the UC Berkeley School of Information on February 15, 2008. Audio of her lecture is available here:

MP3 link

Julie E. Cohen is a Professor of Law at the Georgetown University Law
Center.

She teaches and writes about intellectual property law and privacy law, with
particular focus on copyright and on the intersection of copyright and
privacy rights in the networked information society. She is a co-author
of Copyright in a Global Information Economy (Aspen Law & Business, 2d
ed. 2006), and is a member of the Advisory Boards of the Electronic
Privacy Information Center and Public Knowledge. From 1995 to 1999,
Professor Cohen taught at the University of Pittsburgh School of Law.
From 1992 to 1995, she practiced with the San Francisco firm of
McCutchen, Doyle, Brown & Enersen, where she specialized in intellectual
property litigation. Professor Cohen received her A.B. from Harvard
University and her J.D. from the Harvard Law School, where she was a
Supervising Editor of the Harvard Law Review. She is a former law clerk
to Judge Stephen Reinhardt of the United States Court of Appeals for the
Ninth Circuit.

Abstract

Rethinking Unauthorized Access
In recent years, the law has been asked to respond to a variety of
disputes involving the accessibility of information and related
standards and practices. These disputes cover the waterfront from the
design of proprietary media players to network neutrality to privacy
protection for search queries. So far, the law has been unable to
generate compelling discourses and principles for evaluating them. This
chapter will offer another way of thinking about issues of accessibility
and unauthorized access. I begin by exploring some of the situations in
which the legal rhetorics of innovation, competition, trespass, and
freedom of speech have failed to generate sustainable solutions to
problems of unauthorized access. Next, I consider some alternate ways of
conceptualizing the manner in which networked information technologies
create, disrupt, and “regulate” geographies of accessibility and
inaccessibility. The reference point for this exercise is not
innovation, competition or expressive freedom, but rather what I will
call the “informatics of everyday practice,” a term intended to
encompass all of the ways in which situated, embodied users experience
and interact with networked information technologies and the purposes
for which they do so. Finally, I consider some lessons for law and
policy. First, attention to the informatics of everyday practice
suggests that the law should shelter hacking and tinkering in many
instances, and explains why those activities are valuable both
intrinsically and instrumentally. But altering the law to privilege
technical self-help is not a panacea. I will argue that the law also
should pay closer attention to the design of network standards and
related “expert” processes.

Deirdre Mulligan came to South Hall and spoke to the UC Berkeley School of Information on February 13, 2008. The audio for her talk is available here:

MP3 Link

Bio

Deirdre K. Mulligan is the director of the Samuelson Law, Technology &
Public Policy Clinic and a clinical professor of law at the UC
Berkeley School of Law (Boalt Hall). Before coming to Boalt, she was
staff counsel at the Center for Democracy & Technology in Washington.
Through the clinic, Mulligan and her students foster the public’s
interest in new computer and communication technology by engaging in
client advocacy and interdisciplinary research, and by participating
in developing technical standards and protocols. The clinic’s work has
advanced and protected the public’s interest in free expression,
individual privacy, balanced intellectual property rules, and secure,
reliable, open communication networks.
Mulligan writes about the risks and opportunities technology presents
to privacy, free expression, and access and use of information goods.
Recent publications about privacy include: “Storing Our Lives Online:
Expanded Email Storage Raises Complex Policy Issues,” with Ari
Schwartz and Indrani Mondal, forthcoming 2005, I/S: A Journal of Law
and Policy for the Information Society; and, “Reasonable Expectations
in Electronic Communications: A Critical Perspective on the Electronic
Communications Privacy Act,” 72 Geo. Wash. L. Rev. 1557 (2004).
Mulligan was a member of the National Academy of Sciences Committee on
Authentication Technology and Its Privacy Implications; the Federal
Trade Commission’s Federal Advisory Committee on Online Access and
Security, and the National Task Force on Privacy, Technology, and
Criminal Justice Information. She was a vice-chair of the California
Bipartisan Commission on Internet Political Practices and chaired the
Computers, Freedom, and Privacy (CFP) Conference in 2004. She is
currently a member of the California Office of Privacy Protection’s
Advisory Council and a co-chair of Microsoft’s Trustworthy Computing
Academic Advisory Board. She serves on the board of the California
Voter Foundation and on the advisory board of the Electronic Frontier
Foundation.

Abstract

The California Security Breach Information Act (AB 700/SB 1386) has
been adopted, with modest modifications, by 39 additional states and
the District of Columbia. This law encourages firms to adopt sounder
security investments by requiring them to notify individuals of
security breaches of their personal information.

The use of compulsory information disclosures as a regulatory tool is
an important, modern, development in American law. The Toxics Release
Inventory (TRI), a publicly available EPA database that contains
information on toxic chemical releases and other waste management
activities, established under the Emergency Planning and Community
Right-to-Know Act of 1986 (EPCRA) is credited with providing
incentives for reductions and better management of toxic chemicals by
firms eager to avoid reporting releases and with providing information
essential to citizen and government oversight, engagement and action.
The California Security Breach Information Act was modeled on the TPRI.

Based on research documenting how the specific aspects of the
EPCRA—including standardized, centralized and electronic reporting and
public accessibility of data—the reported incidents, and the
non-profit community contributed to its successes, as well as
qualitative interviews of security and privacy professionals within
firms about security investments and the effects of security breach
notification laws in particular, this paper considers the extent to
which the current structure of security breach notification laws are
producing a “race-to-the-top” with respect to information security and
makes recommendations for statutory reforms aimed at facilitating such
a race by enabling greater public oversight, cross-firm learning,
market activity, and targeted regulatory intervention.

Henry Jenkins is the Co-Director of the MIT Comparative Media Studies Program and the Peter de Flores Professor of Humanities. On Wednesday, February 6th, 2008, Professor Jenkins spoke at the UC Berkeley School of Information as part of the Distinguished Lecture Series.

The audio for this lecture, titled “Combating the Participation Gap: Why New Media Literacy Matters,” is available here:

MP3 link

Abstract

According to recent studies by the Pew Center on the Internet And American Life, more than half of American teens online have produced media content and about a third have circulated media that they have produced beyond their immediate friends and family. These statistics reflect the growing importance of participatory culture in the everyday lives of American young people. Work across a range of disciplines suggest that these emerging forms of participatory culture are important sites for informal learning and may be the crucible out of which new conceptions of civic engagement are emerging. Drawing on insights from a recent white paper produced for the MacArthur Foundation, this talk will discuss the need to develop new forms of media literacy pedagogy which reflects this context of a participatory culture, materials which both respond to the ethical challenges confronted by those teens who are already producing and circulating their own media as well as the challenges confronting those youth who are excluded from participation in these on-line worlds as a consequence of lack of access to technologies, skills, competencies, and cultural experiences taken for granted by their contemporaries. These issues can not be understood through a simple opposition between digital natives and digital immigrants, but rather require us to dig deeper into the diverse range of experiences young people have online and the range of different interactions between adults and teens in these new participatory culture. In the course of the presentation, I will be sharing a range of curricular materials and activities being developed by MIT’s Project nml to support the teaching of these new social skills and cultural competencies.

Bio

Henry Jenkins is the Co-Director of the MIT Comparative Media Studies Program and the Peter de Flores Professor of Humanities. He is also the author and/or editor of twelve books on various aspects of media and popular culture, including Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide, Fans, Bloggers and Gamers: Exploring Participatory Culture, The Wow Climax: Tracing the Emotional Impact of Popular Culture, Textual Poachers: Television Fans and Participatory Culture, Hop on Pop: The Politics and Pleasures of Popular Culture, and From Barbie to Mortal Kombat: Gender and Computer Games. Jenkins writes regularly about media and cultural change at his blog, henryjenkins.org. He is one of the principal investigators for The Education Arcade, a consortium of educators and business leaders working to promote the educational use of computer and video games and of the Knight Center for Future Civic Media, a joint effort with the MIT Media Lab to use new media to enhance how people live in local communities. He is one of the principle investigators for GAMBIT, a lab focused on promoting experimentation through game design, and of Project nml, a MacArthur Foundation funded project that develops curricular materials focused on promoting the social skills and cultural competencies needed to become a full participant in the new media era. Jenkins has a MA in Communication Studies from the University of Iowa and a PhD in Communication Arts from the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

As part of our weekly ISD Lecture Series, writer and researcher Jamais Cascio (Institute for the Future, World Changing, Open the Future) came to South Hall and spoke about “Futurism and its Discontents.” The audio for this lecture is available here:

MP3 link

Abstract:

In a rapidly-changing, uncertain environment, the ability to think constructively about various future possibilities is more important than ever. “Foresight Specialists,” “Scenario Planners,” “Trend Spotters” and good old “Futurists” provide a specialized service that few businesses, non-profits, and governments have organically — and fewer still recognize that they need. I’ll talk about why today’s futurism has more to do with imagining the possible than thinking the unthinkable, why futurist ethics matters more than futurist economics, and whether futurism might just be the best job out there for the easily-distracted generalist.

Mitch Kapor gave the third installment in his series of Distinguished Lectures here at the UC Berkeley School of Information yesterday. His talk was entitled, “Disruptive Innovations I Have Known and Loved, Part 3: Virtual Worlds”. Audio from the talk is here and some photos from the event are here.

Mitch talked about why he finds virtual worlds like Second Life so compelling. He illustrated this with an anecdote about a performance that Suzanne Vega gave which was mirrored in Second Life (here are a couple youtube videos of her performance and the making of her virtual guitar). Mitch realized while watching the recording of this performance that the capabilities of something like Second Life only depend on the limits of the human imagination. That’s a profound concept; we can’t even imagine how removing physical limitations on space and resources will affect what people can do in virtual worlds.

Mitch then spent a while talking about the business model for Second Life and about how it is slowly transitioning to a more open environment: from the client (which is now open source), to the architecture and even plugging your own segments of the Second Life Universe. In the Q&A, Mitch addressed issues with long-term business models of virtual worlds, the implications virtual worlds have for robotics and governance issues (both in the norms sense and in the underlying behavior and rules of the world).