I’m continuing to make an attempt at following the Berkman center’s ILAW event, as far as that’s possible through the excellent notes in the Copyfight blog and by Dan Gillmor. Must be a fascinating event.
Yesterday’s session included talks by Lessig on architecture as regulation [exercise for the reader: apply this to whois policy, privacy protection, and the architectural question of thin vs. thick registries], and by Zittrain on ICANN: What brought us to the point where ICANNwatch is a site you might need to watch? One note I found particularly interesting was a dialogue during the final discussion, as reported in the Copyfight blog: Charlie [Nesson] asks JZ [Zittrain]: “Jonathan, you follow Larry [Lessig] and tell story of ICANN. The message is that the effort was all miscast from the beginning. Stuart Lynn says the government must come in. So are you as pessimistic about the Net as Larry?” JZ: “No, definitely not. But I remember that we threw a meeting here, about ICANN membership; we were looking for a good, fair system, as disinterested academics. We had [inaudible] come in, from Common Cause. He said ‘We tried membership; it failed.’ I think the board runs it, now. And this is Common Cause. There’s sort of a lesson in that.”
Today, things focus on the evolution of copyright law in the US.
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