Stanford Center for Internet and Society

Marc Rotenberg will discuss the work of the public interest law advocate in Washington -- the legislative process, the role of litigation, regulatory proceedings, coalitions, and advocacy. He will also describe opportunities for law students to join EPIC during the summer through the Internet Public Interest Opportunities Program (IPIOP).Tuesday, January 29, 2002
12:30 p.m.
Room 80, Moot Courtroom
Stanford Law School
Stanford, CA

Marc Rotenberg is Executive Director of the Electronic Privacy Information Center, one of the leading Internet policy organizations in the United States.

This talk will explore the ways in which changes in the architecture of communications technologies call into question the doctrinal approaches the Supreme Court and lower courts have taken to constitutional conflicts between speakers and property owners--that is, First Amendment challenges to legal regimes protecting real, personal, and intellectual property. If we want to take these First Amendment questions seriously, and we should, it may be time to recalibrate the doctrine machine.
Monday, November 19, 2001
4:00 - 5:30 p.m.
Faculty Lounge
2d Floor
Stanford Law School

Light refreshments will be served.

The Commissioner will discuss the issues related to online privacy and the FTC's role in the area of online privacy, including the Commission's law enforcement activities, the agency's recommendation that Congress enact privacy legislation, and the Financial Modernization Act. The Commissioner will also address the status of privacy legislation and what such legislation might look like.

After laying out these issues the Commissioner will discuss the FTC Chairman Muris's new privacy agenda and some of the costs to e-commerce of moving away from privacy legislation. Commissioner Thompson will elaborate on the recent shift in America to security concerns in light of the September terrorist attacks and how this new emphasis impacts privacy.

A discussion around copyright law, royalty collection in the digital realm, the protection of coprighted work through encryption and watermarking, and the use of legislation and lawsuits to protect established business models. Presentation by Jenny Toomey of Future of Music Coalition.

Panelists:
- John Shaeffer, Adjunct Professor, Santa Clara University, School of Law
- Larry Lessig, Professor, Stanford University, Law SchoolJenny Toomey is an activist and a musician. She is a member of the board of the Low Power Radio Coalition, has performed in several bands, and has written extensively about music and Internet technology.

This talk will discuss the ways we limit the range of discussion of policy choices by invoking the term "intellectual property." It will argue that we should discard the phrase and instead focus our discussion on the specific legal areas. We should discuss copyright, patent, and trademark issues as matters of policy, not property.

Listen to the talk in RealAudio. (It is a bit quiet in the beginning and lasts approximately an hour and a half.)Siva Vaidhyanathan is currently an Assistant Professor, School of Library & Information Studies at University of Wisconsin at Madison.

Biography

Open Source Software or Free Software appears contrary to conventional wisdom about intellectual property--free products challenge commercially-developed products in quality and market share. This talk explores the economics of Open Source, arguing that software complexity explains this result and overturns conventional thinking on property rights. Paper abstract: Open source software, developed by volunteers, appears counter to conventional wisdom about private provision of public goods. Standard theory holds that without property rights (or excludability), free-riding inhibits private investment in non-rival goods such as information and software. But complex open source products challenge commercially-developed software in quality and market share. I argue that the complexity of software changes the results. For complex goods under asymmetric information, open source developers self-select, offsetting free-riding losses. But commercial firms lack information necessary for

The music industry has proposed a range of "security technologies" designed to prevent the unauthorized copying of recorded music.

Recently a group of researchers, including the speaker Prof. Edward Felten, was forced to withdraw from publication a paper analyzing several of these technologies, due to threats of litigation by the music industry.

This talk will discuss what happened:

- the status of anti-copying technology
- how the music industry is trying to prevent copying
- an overview of the technical analysis
- how and why the authors were threatened
- the effect of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act on computer security researchers

Peer-to-peer network architectures have come to broad attention over the last several years with the success of Napster and other applications.

Many see "pure" peer-to-peer networks as the greatest challenge to enforcement of laws on Internet-related conduct, such as copyright, child pornography, and hate speech.

However, a closer study of network design issues suggests that such immunity may be unachievable on a mass scale without a concerted dedication of public network resources.Tim Wu is technical marketing director for Riverstone Networks.

This presentation will feature live journeys into online virtual worlds where ad hoc property and civil rules of conduct are emerging. From avatar citizens pilfering hairstyles and ending up in a moot court to communities and enterprises utilizing franchising and choardic structures, this fascinating corner of the net illustrates
the concept that in Cyberspace, the code is the community.Bruce Damer is a founding director of the Contact Consortium, a key forum and standards body for virtual worlds on the Internet. He is author of Avatars, Addison Wesley Longman (1997) and a featured speaker on social issues in avatar Cyberspace at conferences such as ACM CHI, CSCW, SIGGRAPH, MediARTech, the American Association of Anthropologists and other venues.

Del Torto will be discussing human rights, encryption technologies, and his recent work in Guatemala. This discussion will cover some of the basic issues: international treaties (proposed and existing), UCITA, US crypto export controls and other US initiatives and the work of the CRF in Guatemala as examples of the hard questions at the intersection of human rights work and controls on cryptography.
Dave Del Torto is the founder & executive director of the CryptoRights Foundation (CRF), Dave has worked in the cryptography industry as a founding employee of PGP Inc, principal crypto consultant at Network Associates, chief security officer at MEconomy, Inc and director of technology at Deloitte & Touche's Security Services division. He leads the CRF's international security efforts for human rights workers and is building the CRF into a global human rights technical security service organization.