Stanford Center for Internet and Society

Monday January 30, 2006
12:30-1:30 PM
Room 280A
Stanford Law School
Open to All
Lunch Served

Computer technologies that I collect under the heading "social software" increase the salience of informal groups. Their salience raises important questions about both the significance and the benefits of informal groups. I organize analysis of those questions around the concept of governance, and the concept of information governance in particular.

Read the paper.About the Speaker: Michael J. Madison is Associate Dean for Research and Associate Professor of Law at the University of Pittsburgh School of Law, where he specializes in copyright law, the law of intellectual property, the Internet, and electronic commerce. He was previously the Director of Pitt’s Certificate Program in Intellectual Property and Technology Law.

Monday January 23, 2006
12:30-1:30 PM
Room 280A
Stanford Law School
Open to All
Lunch Served

Sony's latest Digital Rights Management (DRM)-endeavour earned a charge of "fraud, false advertising, trespass and the violation of state and federal statutes prohibiting malware, and unauthorized computer tampering". The technology installs, unnoticed by the user, a piece of software that prevents consumers from unauthorised copying, is able to monitor and report user behaviour back to the firm and, accidentally, holds the door wide open for Trojans. Under other circumstances one would be tempted to describe such a strategy a hostile "spy at-tack". In case of Sony BMG, this seems to be part of a business model to sell digital music to consumers. The talk will have a closer look at the charges of the EFF and a Californian lawyer against Sony BMG‚s latest DRM strategy. The Sony BMG case adds a number of interesting new dimensions to the 'DRM and Consumer' debate. The talk will explain why the case is so important, also against the background of similar recent case law in Europe, and why it points into an entirely new direction of talking about DRM.

The Citoyen of Electronic Government

with
Christoph Engemann
CIS Fellow

Monday December 5, 2005
12:30-1:30 PM
Room 280A
Stanford Law School
Open to All
Lunch Served

Electronic Government is the attempt of a fundamental reform of the means of operation of a nation state. The still largely paper based bureaucracy's of public administrations attempt to move to an IT-Infrastructure akin to the ERM-Systems of the private sector. This will change internal and external relationships of public administrations as well as deeply affect economic and social policies.

In this presentation Christoph Engemann will show his analysis of the implicit ideals of citizenship in Germanys current E-Government programs. He will describe the role of Government issued Smart Cards in E-Government and why they are becoming a central tool in Germanys social policies for welfare-state reform. He will address the underlying change in the mode of allocating collective ressources and show how this leads to a reconfiguration of the role of the Citizen. Finally on a more philosophical level, the presentation will question the principles of the mode of relationship between State and Citizen that arise with these E-Government programs.Christoph Engemann is currently finishing his dissertation titled 'The Citoyen of Electronic Government' at the Graduate School of Social Sciences University of Bremen. His main areas of research are new media and statehood, authentication media, political economy of the Internet and the European unification and its media. He has taught both sociology and media-studies at the University of Bremen and the Bauhaus University Weimar. Recent publications are on E-Government, Free Software and Lifelong Learning. He currently is on the academic jobmarket with a post-doc project on E-Government and the European Welfare State.

Tim Wu
Professor, Columbia University

Monday November 28, 2005
12:30-1:30 PM
Room 280A
Stanford Law School
Open to All
Lunch Served

Television's now-dominant business model is under attack from all directions. Telephone companies, Apple, Netflix, Tivo and even TV stations all want to challenge cable operators as the dominant distributors of home media content. But how does law influence the competition, and what should the future of television be?Tim Wu is a Professor at Columbia Law School and a visiting Professor
at Stanford Law School. He has worked in the telecommunications
industry, the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals, and the United States

Podcasting: Legal Issues of the Revolution

with

Colette Vogele
Vogele & Associates
CIS Non-Residential Fellow

Monday November 14, 2005
12:30-1:30 PM
Room 280A
Stanford Law School
Open to All
Lunch Served

Like the rapid development of blogging over the past few years, podcasting is emerging with light speed as the most popular method for distributing audio and visual content on the internet. Podcasting allows performers, writers, journalists, musicians, businesses, radio stations, friends, or family to produce high quality audio and visual content (podcasts) with relative ease, and then distribute that creative content with the touch of a few buttons. Indeed, all you really need to create your own podcast is a computer, the free software, and a microphone. Unlike RealAudio, Windows Media or QuickTime players, podcasts are proving more attractive than streaming content because podcasts can be automatically aggregated and downloaded by the listener, and they are portable -- which means you can take your favorite news program, radio show, or silly married couple banter with you wherever you go. Listeners are unchained from their computers as they enjoy their favorite podcasts. And popularized with the help of celebrities like Adam Curry (aka the podfather) and the success of Apple's iPod and other mp3 players, podcasting is likely to change the way we all consume internet-delivered multi-medial content.

Monday November 7, 2005
12:30-1:30 PM
Room 280A
Stanford Law School
Open to All
Lunch Served

From the plays of Aristophanes in ancient Athens, and the writing of Juvenal in imperial Rome, through the role of court jesters in medieval Europe, satire and parody have been used to express social and political critique, even in repressive societies that did not recognize a right to freedom of speech. Culture jamming continues this tradition, using the commercialized iconography of modern media and marketing to challenge the powerful. Recent developments in digital technology have returned power to individuals and communities to create vivid widely disseminated cultural critiques.

The Stanford China Law Association, SLATA, and the Center for
Internet and Society will be co-hosting a discussion on

Freedom of Expression and the Internet in China

Friday, November 4, 2005

at 12:30
in room 280A at
Stanford Law School
map
and will feature a FREE CHINESE BUFFET.

The following speakers will participate in the event:

Xiao Qiang, a Tiananmen Square activist and former executive director of the NGO Human Rights in China, now the Director of the Berkeley China Internet Project.

Washington Wars: An Insider's Post-Grokster
View of the Fight over Internet File-Sharing

with

Adam Eisgrau
Executive Director
P2P United

Monday October 24, 2005
12:30-1:30 PM
Room 280A
Stanford Law School
Open to All
Lunch Served

You've checked out the software, possibly posted bail, read the opinion and thought about theory, but you haven't really "grokked" Grokster (and Morpheus, and BearShare and eDonkey and Blubster) until you've taken this behind-the-scenes tour of the way the fight over file-sharing was really fought in the halls of Congress, on the pages of the press and in the hearts and minds of a generation. Adam Eisgrau, lobbyist for the developers of the software just named, will provide a rare glimpse into the real workings of one of the new century's most contentious issues and its larger implications -- not just for copyright law, the Internet or e-commerce, but for the flow of information envisioned by the Framers of the Constitution as critical to the health of Democracy itself. Join Adam for a wild ride from the trenches to the clouds and back again.

The Center for Internet and Society and the
Stanford Law and Technology Association

present

Representative Rick Boucher

discussing

DC Perspectives on MGM v. Grokster and
How to Facilitate Legal Online Music Delivery

Monday September 19, 2005
12:30-1:30 PM
Room 180
Stanford Law School
Open to All
Lunch ServedDon't miss this amazing opportunity to hear one of Congress' smartest members discuss the future of digital music. Representative Boucher (D-VA) has been at the forefront of action to help preserve user rights in the digital era. He fought for a more balanced approach to the Digital Millennium Copyright Act and introduced the Digital Media Consumer Rights Act (DMCRA) to try to create more balance in the law. Monday, he will talk about Congress' response to the MGM v. Grokster decision decided by the Supreme Court last session, and options for ways to facilitate legal music delivery.

Monday April 25, 2005
12:30 – 1:30 p.m.
Room 180
Free and Open to all!
Lunch Served

The ability of service providers, application developers and hardware firms to innovate and consumers to communicate over the Internet will be determined in two high profile Supreme Court cases in the current term – National Cable Telecommunications Association and Federal Communications Commission v. Brand X and Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Studies, Inc. V. Grokster. In Open Architecture as Communications Policy, Dr. Cooper shows that policymakers have failed to appreciate how profoundly important open networks and the flow of information have been for dynamic innovation in the digital economy. Dr. Cooper holds a Ph.D. from Yale University and is a former Yale University and Fulbright Fellow. He is Director of Research at the Consumer Federation of America, a Fellow at the Stanford Law School Center for Internet and Society, the McGanon Communications Research Center, and an Associated Fellow at the Columbia University Institute on Tele-Information.