Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society

In a Nov. 30 op-ed in Technology Review, Harvard Law School Professor Jonathan Zittrain discusses the consequences of the rise of mobile devices and the shift in power from the end user and software developers to operating system vendors.

According to John Palfrey, businesspeople are often insufficiently attentive to the ways that intellectual property rights can be acquired and exercised. His new book, “Intellectual Property Strategy” (MIT Press), is thus written with businesspeople in mind. Palfrey, Vice Dean for Library and Information Resources and Faculty Co-Director of the Berkman Center for Internet and Society, argues for leaders of businesses and non-profit organizations to adopt IP policies that go beyond the traditional, highly restrictive “sword and shield” approach, and that instead focus on flexibility and creativity.

At a recent event at Harvard Law School, HLS Professor Lawrence Lessig and Harvard Kennedy School Professor David Gergen discussed Lessig’s new book, “Republic, Lost: How Money Corrupts Congress—and a Plan to Stop It.” The event was co-hosted by the Harvard Law School Library, Edmond J. Safra Center for Ethics, the Harvard Kennedy School Center for Public Leadership, and the Berkman Center for Internet & Society.

The Berkman Center for Internet & Society has partnered with Grammy awarding-winning artist Lady Gaga, the John D. & Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation and the California Endowment to launch the Born This Way Foundation (BTWF), a non-profit charitable organization that will support programs and initiatives aimed at empowering youth.

Professor John Palfrey ’01 was a keynote speaker at the Open World Forum, held September 22-24, in Paris, France. The Open World Forum brings together 160 experts from around the world to discuss technological, economic and social initiatives.

Zeynep Tufekci, an assistant professor at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, argued that social media have the power to "upset the erstwhile stable dynamics of repression under durable authoritarian regimes" at a luncheon talk sponsored by the Berkman Center for Internet & Society. Tufekci, who is also a fellow at the Berkman Center, studies the interaction between technology and social, cultural and political dynamics.

In celebration of Constitution Day—the annual celebration of the signing of the U.S. Constitution on Sept. 17, 1787—HLS professors Noah Feldman and John Palfrey delivered talks to university audiences about the document upon which the American legal and political systems have been built.

This fall, Susan Davies, currently serving as Deputy Counsel to President Barack Obama ’91, will join the HLS faculty as a Lecturer on Law. Vivek Kundra, the U.S. Chief Information Officer at the White House for the past two-and-a-half years, will hold a joint fellowship this fall, splitting his time between the Berkman Center for Internet & Society and the Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics and Public Policy at Harvard Kennedy School.

Harvard Law Professors Jonathan Zittrain ‘95 and Lawrence Lessig explored the role of journalists and information in the age of blogs, Twitter and Julian Assange, as part of a recent panel at the Aspen Ideas Festival.

A common lament of law students is that casebooks are expensive and heavy. Others say they are static and slow to evolve. Professor Jonathan Zittrain ’95 has set out to address both complaints.

On June 9 and 10, Harvard Law School’s Berkman Center for Internet & Society hosted “Hyper-Public: A Symposium on Designing Privacy and Public Space in the Connected World.” The event united computer scientists with ethnographers, architects, historians, artists, and legal scholars in discussions about the line between public and private spaces in the digital world.

In a June 15 article in the Opinion section of The New York Times, Harvard Law School Professor Jonathan Zittrain ’95 discusses the current state of computer science education, and suggests an alternative approach to teaching that focuses more on the “bigger picture” than “rote work without much prospect for intellectual growth.”

Jonathan Zittrain, HLS professor of law and co-director of the Berkman Center for Internet & Society, has been appointed as the Federal Communications Commission’s Distinguished Scholar, FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski announced May 31.

The Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard helped shape the agenda of Rethink Music, a recent conference that brought together legal, business, and academic experts to discuss new business models for creating and distributing music.

Harvard Law School Professor Yochai Benkler ‘94 has received a Ford Foundation Visionaries Award, it was announced April 29. The award was created in recognition of the 75th Anniversary of the Ford Foundation to celebrate social innovators from a variety of fields.

In an open letter published recently in The New York Review of Books, Harvard Law School Professor Yochai Benkler ’94 and co-author Bruce Ackerman, professor at Yale Law School, detail the detention of Bradley Manning, a US soldier charged with providing government documents to Wikileaks, and call on President Obama and the Pentagon to document grounds for what the authors describe as “illegal and immoral” confinement.

At a recent lecture hosted by HLS Lambda and the Journal of Law & Technology, Harvard Law School’s Henry N. Ess Professor of Law John Palfrey discussed the latest legal and legislative attempts to address cyber-bullying—or, as Palfrey prefers to describe it, bullying in the digital era.

On March 14, the Library Journal announced 50 new inductees to their Movers & Shakers list, including John Palfrey ’01. Movers & Shakers is a distinguished annual award given to those who are shaping the future of libraries and communities across the United States.

Harvard Law Professor Yochai Benkler ’94 has released an article detailing U.S. government and news media censorship of WikiLeaks after the organization released the Afghan War Diary, the Iraq War Logs, and U.S. State department diplomatic cables in 2010. Among his key conclusions: The government overstated and overreacted to the WikiLeaks documents, and the mainstream news media followed suit by engaging in self-censorship. Benkler argues further that there is no sound Constitutional basis for a criminal prosecution of WikiLeaks or its leader, Julian Assange.