Monday November 29, 2004
12:30 – 1:30 p.m.
Room 230
Free and Open to all!
Lunch will be provided
What makes cyberlaw so special? Its brief history suggests it's the capacity of its technologies to reach multiple audiences who can be creators and tinkerers. Both the PC OS and the Internet are open to and powered by amateurs in a way that other technologies are not, and members of one audience can build technologies on top of existing ones that in turn allow others to continue to build. Cyberlaw's central challenge is to establish ways of thinking about such technologies when their undesirable applications -- and very success -- threaten to undermine the recursive potential of the technologies themselves through, respectively, regulation or entrepreneurial enclosure.Jonathan Zittrain is the Jack N. and Lillian R. Berkman Assistant Professor for Entrepreneurial Legal Studies at Harvard Law School and a co-founder of its Berkman Center for Internet & Society. His research includes the technologies and politics of control of Internet architecture and protocols, the influence of private intermediaries upon online behavior, and the future of open source software. He also has a strong interest in creative, useful, and unobtrusive ways to deploy technology in the classroom. Publications can be found here.