[Sci-tech-public] March Cyberscholars at Yale Next Week!

[Colleen Kaman]

Apologies for any cross-postings --

The next Cyberscholars event  at Yale will offer a terrific line-up of
speakers :

Gabriella Coleman (NYU): *These are the Best of Times and these are
the Worst of Times: Free Software and the Global Politics of
Intellectual Property Law*

Thomas Streeter (University of Vermont): *The History of the Internet
in the History of the Internet*

David Thaw (Yale ISP): *Understanding How Law and Regulation Drive
Corporate Information Security Practices

Thursday, March 26, 2009
Yale Law School
Room 129
6:00 – 8:45 pm
Food Provided: RSVP to bjp2108 at columbia.edu
Announcement: http://civic.mit.edu/event/harvard-mit-yale-cyberscholar-working-group-1
(or see below)

Let me know if you are considering going because a few of us are
planning to go from the Boston area -

Finally, the next Cyberscholars event, co-sponsored by the Center for
Future Civic Media and CMS, will be at MIT and is tentatively
scheduled for Thursday, April 23rd -

Colleen




*Gabriella Coleman*: *These are the Best of Times and these are the
Worst of Times: Free Software and the Global Politics of Intellectual
Property Law*

This talk interrogates the broader historical rise of free software in
relationship to the massive changes that have transpired in
intellectual property law in the last twenty five years. To do so, I
present what were initially two independent historical trajectories
concerning intellectual property that over the last decade have become
intimately intertwined. The first trajectory pertains to free
software's maturity into a global techno-social and legal movement and
the second turns to the globalization of intellectual property
provisions pushed by trade associations, such as the Business Software
Alliance, and administered through global institutional bodies, like
the World Trade Organization. In this story, I emphasize a string of
ironies (and briefly theorize the importance of historical irony), but
the main irony that frames the narrative is the following: many
hackers want to hack without being political but the broader result is
not only quite political, F/OSS development has even politicized
(though in very particular ways) a crop of hackers. While many free
software hackers simply want to ensure their productive freedom and
are driven by the pleasures of hacking (as opposed to explicit
political resistance), the social element of this movement
unintentionally acted like informal law education. Participation in
free software inadvertently trained a generation of hackers to become
an army of amateur legal scholars who have built a rival legal
morality; these hackers now represent the largest pool of amateur
intellectual property and free speech scholars in the world. Armed
with this legal consciousness, many developers have come to question
and some to intentionally fight the “global harmonization” of
intellectual property principles. This narrative structure allows me
to demonstrate how and when these partially independent trajectories
intersected, to become inseparable histories locked in a battle over
the future of the very technologies—notably the personal computer and
the Internet—that have enabled and facilitated the existence of both
proprietary software firms and the free software movement.

*Thomas Streeter: **The History of the Internet in the History of the Internet*

The embrace, use, and continued development of the internet has been
shaped by the collective experience of how it emerged. Popular
culture, everyday practice, and the U.S. Supreme Court assume the
internet to be a uniquely open and democratic communication
technology. This is not necessitated by technology itself. The
openness of the internet, rather, is to a significant degree a product
of the peculiar historical circumstances in which it developed. I will
discuss how several historical contingencies contributed to the
construction of the internet as open: the in the 1970s cultivation by
advocates of "personal" computing of romantic expressive tropes
against a backdrop of instrumental reasoning, the way engineers
quietly guided the growing internet into a space between the
differentially charged force fields of military, corporate,
university, and NSF funding in the 1980s, and the connected rise of
open source computing in the 1990s.
As a result of this historical experience, the internet's history has
been inscribed in its practical character and use. The internet has
served as a socially evocative object for millions, and created a
context in which an ongoing exploration of the meaning of core
principles like rights, property, freedom, capitalism, and the social
have been made vivid and debated in ways that go well beyond the usual
elite modes of discussion. It has played a key role in casting into
doubt the certainties of both market policies and corporate liberal
ones, and widened the range of possibility for democratic debate and
action, bringing to the surface political issues that have been
dormant since the progressive era in the U.S. But this efflorescence
of openness is not the result of underlying truths about technology
(or about progress or humanity) breaking through the crusts of
tradition and inequality. It is the result of peculiarities of history
and culture. The role of romanticism in particular reveals, not a
universal truth, but the historical contingencies at work in the
creation of both technology and democracy. As a practical matter, a
new politics of internet policy making in the U.S. would be wise to
take that history into account, and start from the widely felt
tensions between romantic and utilitarian individualism and move
towards a richer, more mature approach towards democratic
decision-making. But the larger moral of this story is that democracy
is an historical accident worth cultivating.

*David Thaw:* *Understanding How Law and Regulation Drive Corporate
Information Security Practices*

My research seeks to develop an understanding of the relationship
between regulation and corporate information security practices. I
seek to understand whether specific forms of regulation yield
information practices that have been identified as essential by
experts in computer and information security, and through a
comparative assessment whether certain forms of regulation are better
aligned than others with these practices. Integrally related, I seek
to understand the manner in which various forms of regulation alter
the role of domain experts—specifically alter their power,
independence and access to resources—within the regulated institution.
Finally, through an analysis grounded in behavioral economics I seek
to understand the ways in which specific forms of regulation affect
firms information security investment strategies, both independently
and within sectors.

--

*Gabriella Coleman* is an Assistant Professor of Media, Culture, and
Communication at NYU. Her work examines the role of the law and new
media technologies in extending and critiquing liberal values and
sustaining new forms of political activism. She received her Ph.D. in
Socio-Cultural Anthropology from the University of Chicago and her
B.A. from Columbia University.

*Thomas Streeter* is an Associate Professor of Sociology at the
University of Vermont, where he studies the role of cultural beliefs
in shaping things like institutions, property, legal regulation, and
technology. His books include *Selling the Air: A Critique of the
Policy of Commercial Broadcasting in the United States* (1996) and a
forthcoming book tentatively titled *The Net Effect: Reflections on
the Cultural Politics of Internet Structure*.

*David Thaw* is a Visiting Fellow at Yale Law School's Information
Society Project. He is currently finishing his dissertation at UC
Berkeley's School of Information. David received his J.D. from
Berkeley Law in 2008, his M.A. in Political Science from Berkeley in
2004, and his B.S. in Computer Science and B.A. in Government from the
University of Maryland in 2003.