Cardozo law professor and brand new Yale ISP Fellow Susan Crawford is doing a remarkable job today live-blogging day 2 of Yale's Digital Cops in a Virtual Environment--a conference featuring a number of people familiar to Copyfight readers. Among these: Jonathan Zittrain, Michael Froomkin, Lee Tien, Eddan Katz and Jack Balkin.
For those of you who, like me, wish you were there, below is a quick tour of the action:
Introductory post: topics include possible FCC jurisdiction over the Domain Name System (DNS) as an IP-enabled service (!) and the ongoing FCC proceeding on CALEA.
Beryl Howell and Alan Davidson: Howell argues that specific laws must be enacted to address specific problems, and that the law must be updated to reflect changes; Davidson argues that we have a disconnect between social norms and the laws we have on the books (hear, hear): "How many laws have you broken today?"
Orin Kerr: Kerr suggests that computer-related crimes will end up with a different set of procedural rules--"network" criminal procedures. Crimes may be the "same" online and off, but they're committed in different ways.
Sonia Katyal: Discusses convergence of "consumer" and "government" surveillance--"Interesting from an IP perspective, because this kind of surveillance alters understanding of IP rights in cyberspace, giving copyright a predatory and invasive and panoptic dimension" (indeed!).
Marc Rotenberg: Addresses pre v. post-9/11 privacy: If you assume all information might be useful in some investigation, where do we draw the line?
Nicolai Seitz, who won a spot @ the conference by writing an excellent paper: Explores the problems of transborder enforcement of requests for information, arguing that foreign retrieval of not-freely-accessible data should be illegal.
Paul Ohm: After confessing he works for Ashcroft (big laugh), explores issues surrounding electronic evidence--the smoking email, hardrive, etc.
Lee Tien: Addresses "reasonable expectation" of privacy in a world where the architectures of control are invisible. Argues that where architectural regulation hides what it does (an invisible seatbelt), we're heading out of law and into instrumental control.
Jonathan Zittrain: In a perfect follow-up to Lee Tien's observation with regard to invisible control, discusses efforts by Google and Beijing selectively to edit what we see on the Net. Points to the OpenNet Initiative, which provides people with the tools to do SETI@Home-style work in exposing such invisible filtering.
Jack Balkin: Addresses the difficulty using the Net for activism, or "cyberprotest," and explores how this relates to free speech--the bedrock of any functioning democracy. "The key problem in cyberspace speech is proximity and attention. Have to get the attention of your audience, and have to get next to them (picket around them). Find some place where people interested in your speech will listen to you."
