Session One Summary:
Introduction

At this session, the seminar members introduced themselves and their research interests. Class members included a Minnesota state legislator studying at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government, a former employee of the National Security Agency, a divinity school student, and law students with interests including encryption, the implications of Internet filtering technologies, online community-building, and intellectual property control.

Instructor Jonathan Zittrain presented a few of the issues (intellectual property, encryption, and content control) that the class would cover the next few weeks. On the intellectual property front, JZ asked the students to think about a recent controversy regarding "meta-tags"—the key words that web site operators embed into their source code to guide search engines. Some companies have been accused of trademark infringement because they used their competitors' trademarks as meta-tags.

JZ also told the class about "Nucleo," a web site within the Harvard network at which students could post messages about the course, chat with classmates, and browse and add to a library of files relevant to the course.

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