Wendy Seltzer, a Fellow at the Harvard Berkman Center, joined me at the Supernova DC Mixer to discuss a number of subjects relevant to how law impacts the Network Age. She notes how technology innovation has brought control out to the user at the edges of the networks, and how intellectual property rules sometimes can stifle it. Wendy discusses patents and how they affect innovation and progress.
She also discusses the Chilling Effects Project, a clearinghouse for cease and diciest orders people receive that the project posts to help people understand their rights online. We discuss how such takedown notices can get sent, and what a user might do about it.
We look forward to hearing more from Wendy here at the Supernova Hub and at the conference in December.
Joi Ito, Chairman of the Creative Commons, describes what Creative Commons is, and how it works. Visiting the Supernova DC Mixer last week, he noted that CC allows creators to license their works with specific freedoms the creator wants it to carry, so others can share, remix, use commercially, or any combination of those things. He also describes companies and government agencies that are using it, and how the use of the Creative Commons license is evolving to enable sets of data to be shared more widely. This is effecting science and education in profound ways.
One of the things I found most profound was when Joi noted that the Creative Commons was looking less like a legal or political movement, and more like a technical standards body, helping enable interaction of previously incompatible things. Joi is an early stage investor in many popular Web 2.0 companies including Socialtext, Six Apart, and Last.FM, and he’s always worth listening to for his predictions (in this video) of the direction the net is going to take.
As a note, the posts on this site are Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License.
