Upcoming Events and Digital Media Roundup

BERKMAN CENTER FOR INTERNET & SOCIETY AT HARVARD UNIVERSITY
April 14, 2010 // Upcoming events and digital media

[1] [TOMORROW 4/15/10] Berkman Special Event: "Building a More Diverse and Inclusive Legal Profession: A Call to Action" with Brad Smith, General Counsel of Microsoft (http://cyber.harvard.edu/events/2010/04/smith)

[2] [TUESDAY 4/20/10] Berkman Center Luncheon Series: "Open Standards and Patents - A Start-up Perspective" with Mikko Välimäki, is CEO of Tuxera Ltd, adjunct professor at Helsinki University of Technology, Finland (http://cyber.harvard.edu/events/luncheon/2010/04/mikko)

[3] 4/30-5/1: ROFLCon II at MIT (http://cyber.harvard.edu/events/2010/04/roflcon

[SAVE THE DATE 6/28-30] You are invited to the COMMUNIA 2010 Conference on "University in Cyberspace", taking place in Torino, Italy. Visit http://www.communia2010.org/ to learn more and sign up for the announcement list.

[THURSDAY] BUILDING A MORE DIVERSE AND INCLUSIVE LEGAL PROFESSION
=================================================================================
4/15/10, 5:30 PM ET, Austin East Classroom, Austin Hall, Harvard Law School
RSVP is required for those attending in person via the form on this page: http://cyber.harvard.edu/events/2010/04/smith
Free and Open to the Public
Co-sponsored by the Harvard Law Program on the Legal Profession

Topic: Building a More Diverse and Inclusive Legal Profession: A Call to Action
Guest: Brad Smith, General Counsel of Microsoft

The diversity of the legal profession continues to lag the diversity of the American population.  Despite rising awareness of the issue over the last decade and even a number of well-intentioned efforts, progress has been slow.  In this speech, Microsoft General Counsel Brad Smith will make the case for more rapid progress, outline the types of practical steps that are needed at law firms and companies, and speak to new initiatives across the legal profession to make the next decade more successful.

About Brad:

Brad Smith is Microsoft's general counsel and senior vice president, Legal and Corporate Affairs. He leads the company's Department of Legal and Corporate Affairs (LCA), which has just over 1,000 employees and is responsible for the company's legal work, its intellectual property portfolio, and its government affairs and philanthropic work. He also serves as Microsoft's corporate secretary and its chief compliance officer.

Since becoming general counsel in 2002, Smith has overseen numerous negotiations leading to competition law and intellectual property agreements with governments and with companies across the IT sector. He has helped spearhead the growth in the company's intellectual property portfolio and the launch of global campaigns to bring enforcement actions against those engaged in software piracy and counterfeiting, malware, consumer fraud, and other digital crimes. As software has migrated online and into a computing "cloud," one of LCA's current principal goals is to help establish the legal foundation for this next generation of technology.

For more information and a complete description, see the event web page: http://cyber.harvard.edu/events/2010/04/smith

[TUESDAY] BERKMAN LUNCHEON SERIES on OPEN STANDARDS AND PATENTS
==================================================================================
4/13/10, 12:30 PM ET, Berkman Center Conference Room @ 23 Everett St., Cambridge, MA
RSVP is required for those attending in person to Amar Ashar (ashar@cyber.harvard.edu)
This event will be webcast live

Topic: Open Standards and Patents - A Start-up Perspective
Guest: Mikko Välimäki, is CEO of Tuxera Ltd, adjunct professor at Helsinki University of Technology, Finland

What is an open standard and what does it mean when a standard has an increasing number of patents? What are the implications of patenting to IT commodification trends such as open source software? This talk will discuss the inner meaning of the politically hot term "open standard" and the practical implications of having more and more patents in information technology standards from low-level algorithms to high-level functionality. The speaker's main argument is that commodification meets its limits with increasing patenting, that has already put a price tag on open source. As a positive note, nobody should be scared as every intellectual property problem is solvable and also start-ups continue to enter the markets like before. The word "open" just will not equal to free. The talk draws from practical examples in European policy debates where the speaker has participated both as an academic discussant and more recently as the CEO of Tuxera, a company providing Microsoft Windows interoperable file system software solutions on Linux both as open source and proprietary versions.

About Mikko:

Mikko Välimäki, is CEO of Tuxera Ltd. Previously he has lead his own law firm and several software start-up companies, including one that developed a highly-popular graphical user interface for MySQL databases. Mr. Välimäki is also an adjunct professor at Helsinki University of Technology, Finland, and a research fellow at University of Eastern Piedmont, Italy. He has lectured in numerous universities and published four books on software licensing, copyright, patents and related topics. Mr. Välimäki has LL.M. from the University of Helsinki and Ph.D from the Helsinki University of Technology. His university website is at http://www.valimaki.org/

This event will be webcast live; for more information and a complete description, see the event web page: http://cyber.harvard.edu/events/luncheon/2010/04/mikko

ROFLCON II
==================================================================================
4/30-5/1/10, MIT, Cambridge, MA

From the ROFLCon website:

"Another two days and two nights of the most epic internet culture conference ever assembled. Informed commentators suggest that this may be the most important gathering of humanity since the fall of the tower of Babel."

For more information, see: http://cyber.harvard.edu/events/2010/04/roflcon

[SAVE THE DATE] COMMUNIA 2010 CONFERENCE: UNIVERSITY IN CYBERSPACE
==================================================================================

6/28-30/10, Politecnico di Torino, Torino, Italy

Universities are entrusted with the increasingly important responsibility of creating, sharing, and fostering use of knowledge on behalf of society, and to that end, are the recipients of tremendous investments of time, money, space, authority and freedom. Universities have embraced this role in diverse fashions, varying by tradition, period, and discipline, but we now ask them to go further. As we progress ever more deeply into a networked age, our knowledge institutions are faced with concomitant opportunities. They are challenged by society to become a driving force to create and disseminate knowledge - using innovative, effective, and dynamic approaches - derived from and for the networked world.

The COMMUNIA 2010 International Conference will provide a venue for exploring these points, with the twofold objective of defining a shared vision of the future of universities as knowledge institutions and of identifying the main steps leading from vision to reality.

To learn more and sign up for the announcements list, please visit http://www.communia2010.org/.

OTHER EVENTS OF NOTE
=========================

[1] 4/15: Civics in Difficult Places (featuring Berkman Senior Researcher Ethan Zuckman) // MIT Communications Forum:(http://web.mit.edu/comm-forum/forums/difficult_civics.html)

[2] 4/15: Ten Ways to Conceive of the Derivative Work Right in Copyright Law (featuring Julie Cohen and Jonathan Zittrain) // Suffolk University (http://madisonian.net/conferences/2010/03/11/derivative-works-at-suffolk/)

[3] 4/16: NET Institute Conference on Network Economics // NYC (http://www.netinst.org/2010_conference.htm)

[4] 4/16: 7th Annual IP/Gender: Gender & Invention // American University (http://www.wcl.american.edu/pijip/go/events/ip/gender)

[5] 4/16-17: Gleitsman Social Change Film Forum: Can Film Change the World? // Harvard Center for Public Leadership (http://content.ksg.harvard.edu/leadership/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=616&Itemid=164)

[6] 4/21: ISD: Digital Power and Its Discontents // Georgetown University (http://events.georgetown.edu/events/index.cfm?Action=View&CalendarID=359&EventID=75512)

[7] 4/27: Privacy Reconsidered in the Age of Facebook // ACLU of Massachusetts (http://aclum.org/events/index.php)

[8] 4/28-30: Futureweb (http://futureweb2010.wordpress.com/)

[9] 4/27: Internet Security, Internet Freedom // Center for Information Technology Policy (http://citp.princeton.edu/internet-security-internet-freedom/)

[10] 4/28-4/30: FutureWeb: WWWhere Are We Heading? // North Carolina (http://futureweb2010.wordpress.com/)

[11] 5/4: NERCOMP: Copyright and IP for Image Use (http://www.nercomp.org/events/event_single.aspx?id=6005)

[12] 5/6-7: Global Voices Citizen Media Summit // Santiago, Chile (http://summit2010.globalvoicesonline.org/)

[13] 5/11: Free Press Summit // Washington, DC (http://summit.freepress.net/)

[14] 6/8: Intelligence Squared Debate: The Cyber War Threat Has Been Grossly Exaggerated (featuring Berkman Faculty Co-Director Jonathan Zittrain) (http://intelligencesquaredus.org/index.php/debates/cyber-war-threat-has-been-grossly-exaggerated/)

DIGITAL MEDIA: Watch and Listen
================================
Did you miss this week's luncheon talk? Catch up with Berkman videos, podcasts, pictures, and dig in to our archive at http://cyber.harvard.edu/interactive.

-Berkman Luncheon Series: CHRISTIAN SANDVIG on "The Television Cannot Be Revolutionized" (http://cyber.harvard.edu/interactive/events/luncheon/2010/04/sandvig)

-Berkman Luncheon Series: MICHAEL SLABY on "The Values of Technology" (http://cyber.harvard.edu/interactive/events/luncheon/2010/03/slaby)

-Berkman Law Lab Series: JEFF HANCOCK on "Technology and Deception" (http://cyber.harvard.edu/interactive/events/lawab/2010/04/hancock)

-RADIO BERKMAN 147: Digital Hermits and the People Who Scare Them (Adventures in Anonymity III) (http://cyber.harvard.edu/interactive/podcasts/radioberkman147)

SIGN UP TO RECEIVE EMAIL NEWSLETTERS
=======================================
Sign up for Berkman's weekly events email newsletter and more: http://cyber.harvard.edu/getinvolved#mailinglists

GET INVOLVED: connect with social tools and more
=============================================
Jobs, internships, and more: http://cyber.harvard.edu/getinvolved/
Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/berkmancenter
Twitter: http://twitter.com/berkmancenter/
YouTube: http://www.youtube.com/berkmancenter
Flickr: http://www.flickr.com/photos/berkmancenter/
Berkman Homepage RSS Feed: http://cyber.harvard.edu/news/feed/
Events Blog: http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/berkmanevents/
Events Feedback Form: http://bit.ly/berkeventsfeedback

BERKMAN CALENDAR & UPCOMING EVENTS PREVIEW
==================================================

See our events calendar if you're curious about future luncheons, discussions, lectures, conferences, and more: http://cyber.harvard.edu/events. All of our events are free and open to the public, unless otherwise noted.

6/28-6/30: COMMUNIA Conference 2010: Universities & the commons/cyberspace (http://cyber.harvard.edu/node/5608)

ABOUT US
========
The Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University was founded to explore cyberspace, share in its study, and help pioneer its development. For more information, visit http://cyber.harvard.edu.