Radio Berkman

Ownership structures for creative works – such as Copyright, Creative Commons, Fair Use, Public Domain – abound. This week, Kenneth Crews, the director of the Copyright Office at Columbia University, speaks with us about some of the distinctions, and the ways to make sure your work is protected as much or as little as possible.

CC-licensed music this week:

Jaspertine: Pling

Greg Williams: Teagarden Blues and Rain

Internet access. Anymore, it’s something many of us take for granted. Like water from the tap, power from the plug, outrageous outbursts from Kanye West. It’s there, it happens – why question it?

Sure, there’s a lot of buzz about broadband and net neutrality going on in Washington, and in Geek Caves around the country. But the Net users on Main Street haven’t yet hit a tipping point. The fact is, your average consumer’s web connection isn’t very fast or cheap. But it is just fast and cheap enough that they won’t question, complain, or demand better.

What is the ideal web? And how do we get past the consumer complacency to build it?

Well, Clay Shirky has some ideas. And we were lucky enough to get an exclusive with him on One Web Day earlier this week. Listen in as he lays out a few visions for the potential of the web.

CC-licensed music this week:

Coconut Monkeyrocket: “Accidental Beatnik”

Podington Bear – Jackie and Floyd

Have you ever said something you wish you didn’t? Put your foot in your mouth? Insulted someone, cursed, or threatened somebody? In the real world, you can whisper your most seditious thoughts, and hope they don’t come back to bite you.

Well, online, your comments are archived indefinitely. And if you don’t want those comments traced to you, you can just choose a funny forum name, or remain anonymous.

But you are NOT anonymous. Believe it or not most of your anonymous blogs, comments, forum posts, and even emails have tiny digital fingerprints that can lead right back to you. Not a big deal if you’re commenting about how awesome “Blame it on the Rain” was on a Milli Vanilli fan board. But a growing number of online anonymous wordsmiths are being unmasked as they become the subject of civil suits.

Sam Bayard, a Berkman Fellow and Assistant Director of the Citizen Media Law Project has his eye on such cases. And today, we’ll try to figure out whether legal action could put online anonymity out of commission forever.

CC-licensed music this week:

Brad Sucks: Dropping out of School

J Lang: Crazy Love

Steve Schultze is a busy fellow. He is a fellow at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society. He recently joined the Princeton Center for Information Technology Policy as Associate Director. He also is one of the developers behind RECAP – an ambitious and provocative project that seeks to bring publicly available digital court records out from behind a costly paywall.

What is RECAP? Find out on this week’s episode!

And why are there fees for court records? Steve also just dropped a great working paper that goes into more detail on the topic.

If you’re in Washington, DC next week catch Steve’s talk on RECAP at the O’Reilly Gov 2.0 conference on Tuesday, September 8.

Naturally we think Steve will make a terrific addition to the Princeton team — congrats, Steve! — and, while we’re sad to lose him, we’re looking forward to stronger ties to CITP and opportunities to collaborate and partner in the future.

CC-licensed music this week:

Neurowaxx – Pop Circus

General Fuzz – Acclimate

From August 13, 2009:

The hype shows no signs of abating. Now that people have moved from just talking-about-Twitter, to the more meta talking-about-talking-about-Twitter, we here at Radio Berkman decided to take on the topic from our own perspective and see if there is possibly anything new left to be said about the popular microblogging service.

Turns out there is.

CC-licensed music this week:

Coconut Monkeyrocket: “Accidental Beatnik”

Morgantj: Café Connection

Neurowaxx: “Pop Circus”

Podington Bear: “The Squeaky Song”

RAC Remix: Zero (orig. Yeah Yeah Yeahs)

Find the full Twitter debate here:

http://blogs.harvard.edu/mediaberkman/2009/08/13/radio-berkman-supreme-is-twitter-a-revolution-a-debate/

The Berkman Center for Internet Society was blessed with the presence of dozens of interns this summer – some of the best, the brightest, and most energetic folks in the field of cyber study. Four of them came together earlier this summer for a semi-Oxford style debate on a topic of importance. The question: Is Twitter a Revolutionary Force for Social Communication?

We excerpted from this debate for this week’s Radio Berkman (listen here), but the full debate is chock full of some great perspectives on whether Twitter is a force for good, evil, or just not such a big deal. Give it a listen!

Is the idea of a mainstream video culture dead? TV news anchors, sitcom stars, and A-list actors are losing ground to the groundswell of citizen journalists, independent web series creators, and the occasional cats falling off of pianos on YouTube. If everyone is a producer, what role will video play in our lives in the future?

This was one line of questioning taking place at the first ever Open Video Conference in New York City this past June. In addition to the producer question were questions about the sharing of creative works, and questions about how we can make it technologically cheaper and easier to share, collaborate on, and deliver video in the future.

Today’s Radio Berkman is a report back from OVC, with Amar Ashar, Chris Peterson, and Catherine White of the Berkman Center.

Special thanks today to Catherine White who gathered audio from the OVC!

CC-licensed music this week:

Podington Bear – Jackie and Floyd

Morgantj – Café Connection

You don’t need to be a crowned Ranger class master hacker to sneak into someone’s email or facebook account these days. Which means that you’re not simply being a nervous nellie if you’re worried about security.

In fact, users of public WiFi should be worried. If you use WiFi to access some of the most popular email and social networking services, like, gmail, yahoo mail, hotmail, and facebook, your account information floats around in the air, often completely unsecured.

You want some more fear with your coffee? Chris Soghoian, a fellow at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society, took a look into WiFi and account security to find out just how scary the situation is.

CC-licensed music this week:

General Fuzz – Cream

Arslkhan – Love Odyssey

At $80,000 per song, the 24 tracks Jammie Thomas-Rasset is accused of sharing on Kazaa could represent the most expensive album of all time.

Last week a federal jury suggested the fine, adding up to $1.92 million, seemed like a fair price for willful infringement.

Thomas-Rasset’s pro bono legal team of Kiwi Camara and Joe Sibley promise to appeal the verdict in this, the first file sharing case to see trial. A conversation shortly before the trial showed a number of issues that indeed did not make it to court this time around – including the constitutionality of the RIAA’s investigative tactics.

Check out David Weinberger’s conversation with Thomas-Rasset’s lead attorney Kiwi Camara to find out where the defense stands.

CC-licensed music this week:

State Shirt – Computer

Cordafonia – Dreamland

Commons are becoming so common in the digital age (pardon the pun) that they are redefining the term. Music, video, literature, scholarly works, software – all of these can be placed under Creative Commons licenses to allow culture and knowledge to proliferate more freely. Wikipedia operates by similar principles. But where did these principles come from? How do they operate? Where are they going?

Journalist and author David Bollier recently released a history of the digital commons movement, called Viral Spiral: How the Commoners Built a Digital Republic of Their Own. He sat down with David Weinberger to shed some light on this fascinating topic.

CC-licensed music this week:

Chad Crouch – “Horizon Event” and “Be Inspired”