Recent Highlights

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  A Vast Wasteland Revisited (video)

  In 1961, Newton Minow – then Chairman of the Federal Communications Commission – delivered a landmark speech to the National Association of Broadcasters on “Television and the Public Interest,” in which he described television programming as a "vast wasteland" and advocated for public interest programming. He challenged his audience “to sit down in front of your own television set when your station goes on the air and stay there, for a day, without a book, without a magazine, without a newspaper…to distract you. Keep your eyes glued to that set until the station signs off. I can assure you that what you will observe is a vast wasteland.” Fifty years– and innumerable advances in media communications – later, Minow visited Harvard Law School for a forum exploring the future of journalism and the role of the state in the construction of the public sphere.

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  Rethinking Music: Faculty engage music industry experts in two-day conference (video)

  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.

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  Benkler argues against prosecution of WikiLeaks, detailing government and news media "overreaction"

  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.

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  Remixing Langdell

  John G. Palfrey '01, who for six years helped to run HLS’s Berkman Center for Internet & Society, was appointed vice dean for library and information resources in 2008. Palfrey is not a librarian. He is, however, a law professor and cyberspace visionary, whose task in his current position is to meld the old, the new and the emerging digital-era library. 

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  Lessig in The New Republic: Google, copyright and our future

  HLS Professor Lawrence Lessig wrote about Google, copyright and our future in an op-ed “For the Love of Culture” that appeared in the Jan. 26, 2010, edition of The New Republic. He is faculty director of the Edmond J. Safra Foundation Center for Ethics. His latest book, “Remix,” was published in paperback in 2008.

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  Zittrain on the dangers of cloud computing

  In a recent op-ed piece for The New York Times, titled “Lost in the Cloud,” HLS Professor Jonathan Zittrain ’95 argues that the move from running code and storing data on PCs toward doing everything online—or cloud computing—“comes with real dangers,” including loss of data, loss of control, and less privacy protection. He also discussed this topic in a July 9, 2009, article “Google’s Cloud” in Newsweek magazine.

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  Scholars discuss fall-out of Google Book settlement, at Berkman Center conference on open libraries

  What will “libraries” in 2075 look like? Can copyright law be re-engineered? Should we trust Google to make decisions in the public interest? Those were some of the questions discussed at a workshop entitled “Alternative Approaches to Open Digital Libraries in the Shadow of the Google Book Search Settlement,” which took place at Harvard Law School on July 31.

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  Authors of ‘The Cluetrain Manifesto’ assess cyberspace 10 years later

  The following article, "Authors of 'The Cluetrain Manifesto' assess cyberspace 10 years later," by Colleen Walsh, appeared in the June 18, 2009, issue of the Harvard Gazette.

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  Harvard’s Berkman Center to conduct independent review of broadband studies to assist FCC

  The Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University will conduct an independent expert review of existing literature and studies about broadband deployment and usage throughout the world. This project will help inform the FCC’s efforts in developing the National Broadband Plan.