Berkman Buzz: January 20, 2012

Today, many U.S. websites are participating in a blackout in order to express their opposition to pending U.S. legislation—House Bill 3261, The Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and S.968, the PROTECT IP Act (PIPA).

The Berkman Center for Internet & Society does not take an institutional position on matters of policy. However, it encourages its faculty, fellows, staff, and community members to express their viewpoints, and invites in-depth conversations on controversial issues. Our goals are to stimulate informed analysis and to catalyze the expression of diverse opinions.

Consistent with this policy, the Berkman Center’s website is not dark today. Also consistent with that policy, many members of our community are contributing to the call for action, and others have written on this subject.

Excited to be co-hosting @BTWFoundation, @ladygaga, her mom et al for launch 2/29 @Harvard w/ @BerkmanCenter, @zephoria, @hgse, @macfound!
—John Palfrey (@jpalfrey)

Lady Gaga and her mother, Cynthia Germanotta, announced today that they will officially launch the Born This Way Foundation (BTWF) on Wednesday, February 29th, 2012 at Harvard University’s Sanders Theatre. Lady Gaga will be joined by some very special guests as she personally unveils BTWF before a crowd of policy makers, non-profit organizations, foundation leaders and youth themselves who are working to create a kinder and braver world. The one-day event will be co-hosted by BTWF, the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard, the Harvard Graduate School of Education, the John D. & Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation and The California Endowment.

The momentum of the seminar was such that, with financial support from Harvard’s Library Lab, Jeff, Anne, Ben Brady and I have gone on to organize a “library test kitchen” for the spring for the full development, building and testing of some of last semester’s student projects as well as the incubation of other brand new ones. Last semester’s work included flexible carrel designs, modular media/reading/event space structures for insertion into existing library facilities, networked scanning stations, spatial Googling, a radical rethinking of the reference desk, a navigational app for library exploration, as well as designs for district libraries in Bogota, Columbia and South Central Africa. Among other things, this semester’s work will include policy proposals, a book project, and the building of curatorial stations.

Yesterday, while hundreds of sites (including this one, along with Google, Wikipedia, and Reddit) were going black to protest SOPA and PIPA, the Supreme Court released its own copyright blackout, Golan v. Holder (PDF). Justice Ginsburg’s majority opinion held that the First Amendment did not prohibit reclaiming works from the public domain.

Justice Breyer, joined by Justice Alito, gave a stirring dissent. Copyright law, he said, must be “designed to encourage new production,” not just redistribute works already created. Re-copyrighting already-written works “does not encourage anyone to produce a single new work.” Instead, backwards-looking copyright grants create a serious public choice problem.

We need a legal test case, pronto, about whether Apple can insist you sell products made with their tools only through them. @eff?
—Dan Gillmor (@dangillmor)

Kim Jong-Il is gone. That said, he continues to live on, looking at things, on the popular blog Kim Jong-Il Looking At Things which continues to be updated with new content from the archives.

It is now joined by Kim Jong-Un Looking At Things. I think I agree with João Rocha, creator of the original, that the younger Kim seems to be missing some hard-to-pin-down quality that made the original work well.

As Global Voices' Executive Director Ivan Sigal has written, “there are powerful corporate and government forces who would prefer to see the openness and accessibility of the web restricted.” The Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and the Protect-IP Act (PIPA) would both force websites to pro-actively censor potentially copyrighted information, and could, as Sigal wrote, “inflict broad damage on the work of digital activists living under repressive regimes, as well as restrict basic speech freedoms around the world.”

Because these bills have the potential to affect Internet users worldwide, members of the global community have joined Americans in protest. From German digital rights group Netzpolitik to Open Media Canada to individual bloggers and social media users, the sentiment is the same: Stop these bills.