This past Thursday, EFF hosted a Pub Quiz event where teams were asked 8 rounds of questions related to cyberlaw. Our team, from the Berkeley Clinic, was called Notice and TAKEDOWN.
We tied for third place with the Stanford CIS/Fair Use Project Team. Team Google, with Derek Slater, Tim Wu and Harlan Yu, scored second and Keker & Van Nest made first place -- with heavyweights Joe Gratz and Mark Lemley. More pictures here:
I gave my dissertation talk today. It went surprisingly well. I felt my delivery was smooth---with nary an “um”---and people seemed interested! I’ve learned that I have to practice talks 3-4 times before I’m ready to give them. (and the “presenter tools” feature in powerpoint is killer, I must say.)
The dissertation talk is a curious beast on the academic landscape. It involves summing up 5 years of work (at least!) in about 50 minutes. I found it very challenging to both adequately explain the work I’ve done and then make that explanation accessible to a multidisciplinary audience. Apparently, I didn't do such a bad job; I can’t explain how gratifying that is for someone who enjoys teaching.
I’ll post my slides one slideshare in a bit and update this post, but they do need a bit of massaging---I used animation to make images appear and disappear over the text, which doesn’t seem to work with slideshare.
Anyway, I’s tie tie now.
(image by the Schultz-enator)
Aaron Burstein (UC Berkeley Law) and I just finished a large regulatory filing that will be of interest to any of you election technology geeks out there. Enjoy and be sure to let us know if you have feedback (there's another round of comments sometime in the future on a revised draft).
5 May 2008
A Center for Correct, Usable, Reliable, Auditable and Transparent Elections (ACCURATE) submitted public comment today to the U.S. Election Assistance Commission on their draft Voluntary Voting System Guidelines (VVSG), urging the Commission to adopt certain key features fo the draft. The VVSG provides a national certification framework for U.S. voting systems against which 40 states require their voting systems to be certified.
ACCURATE's comments laud the new draft as a groundbreaking and badly needed overhaul of our national voting system standards while making constructive suggestions for further development.
The most significant element of the draft VVSG is the requirement for software independence, which would require voting systems to be designed so that undetected flaws in the voting system software cannot cause changes in the vote count. ACCURATE fully supports requiring software independence as the backbone of a robust and comprehensive next-generation voting system certification regime.
The commentary goes on to emphasize the importance of welcome features of the draft: adversarial vulnerability testing, volume testing, the new framework for usability and accessibility testing and comprehensive voting system documentation requirements. The comment closes by pointing out areas of the VVSG that will require increased institutional support outside of the VVSG process, including the crucial innovation class and a closed loop for incident reporting and feedback.
ACCURATE plans to participate further as the draft VVSG is modified and extended.
Carl Malamud gave today's Distinguished Lecture at the UC Berkeley School of Information entitled, "(Re-)Defining the Public Domain". Audio of the event is here and some pictures are here.
It was a fascinating talk -- almost a performance of sorts -- where Malamud described efforts to increase the public domain along the three branches of our government. His talk incorporated something like 31 individual videos and, unfortunately, the audio provided here can do only so much justice to that content.
Here is the abstract of Carl's talk:
While much of the focus on intellectual property goes to battles over copyright or patents, we should not forget that a large proportion of such material is not property at all. The public domain is available for all to use. Of particular interest for the public domain is the U.S. government, all of whose work is available without restriction for all of us to use.
In this lecture, Carl Malamud explains the principles of the public domain with particular emphasis on the works of government. He will discuss how government often backs away from the clear principle of no property interests in order to maintain control, and how citizens can change that attitude through concrete actions. Malamud will use his own experience in forcing changes in government policy with numerous agencies to illustrate these general principles.
UPDATE [2007-10-22T09:25:04]: The audio linked to above has been updated to include the audio from each of the videos that Carl showed (thanks, Carl!). Also, you can watch a broadcast of the video from Carl's slides hosted by the Internet Archive here.
Link: http://groups.sims.berkeley.edu/podcast/audio/Richard_Stallman_at_UC_Berkeley_12_Sep_2007.ogg
Richard Stallman gave the first UC Berkeley School of Information distinguished lecture of the year today on "Copyright vs Community in the Age of Computer Networks". Here's the abstract:
Copyright developed in the age of the printing press, and was designed to fit with the system of centralized copying imposed by the printing press. But the copyright system does not fit well with computer networks, and only draconian punishments can enforce it. The global corporations that profit from copyright are lobbying for draconian punishments, and to increase their copyright power while suppressing public access to technology. But if we seriously hope to serve the only legitimate purpose of copyright--to promote progress, for the benefit of the public--then we must make changes in the other direction.
Here is the audio in Ogg format (courtesy of Don Marti, editor of LinuxWorld.com).
I was privileged to introduce RMS... here's what I said:
In meatspace, you might know our speaker as Richard Matthew Stallman; in the world of bits and bandwidth, where we spend an increasing amount of our time, he's known simply as RMS. He was raising hell and championing software freedom before I was born, and I'm almost 30. His accomplishments are vast in terms of numbers and magnitude. Stallman has received numerous awards, four honorary doctorates and was awarded the MacArthur Fellowship in 1990. He has long championed the notion of copyleft; a concept which promotes freedom by requiring modified works to be distributed under the same generous license under which the work was originally licensed. In 1989, the Free Software Foundation, which he founded, embodied this notion of copyleft in a general-purpose software license called The GNU General Public License or GPL. The GPL has gone through three revisions since and remains the most widely used license for free and open source software. Richard Stallman stands out for consistenly arguing that, besides the oft-cited pragmatic reasons for free software, there exits a moral imperative that software should be free. So, to tell us more about all of this... without further ado, here's Richard Stallman to speak about "Copyright vs Community in the Age of Computer Networks".
Heather Meeker from Greenberg Traurig spoke yesterday at Pam Samuelson's open source class... and confirmed what I had feared: GPLv3 is dead on arrival.
Later: Oh yeah, she also said that SCO v. IBM is totally irrelevant to the GPL... that case is finally seeing some action as both sides have filed for summary judgement (they've been in discovery and other BS for like 3 years).
Lilia, a recent Master's graduate from here at the iSchool, recounts her frustrating experience with her Master's project, her adviser and intellectual property associated with her project: "An Unfortunate Graduate School Experience".
Lilia and her counsel are spot on about the joint works issue; each author has the ability to do what they want with the materials they produced for their final project. And the blurring of the academic, business and other roles of the students and the adviser is a particularly ill-advised arrangement. However, how the hell is a group of students going to be able to know if they have a marketable product from the beginning? If they would have known that from the beginning, they would have done many things differently and surely would not be in this state where, presumably, the other students are fine with this sub-standard arrangement and the one student who questions things is fired.
Undoubtedly, this follows many of the smaller disputes we see in the intellectual property space: it's not about the intellectual property but about control and, in some sense, the dispute itself. We need to be able to work things out... and everybody has to give a little to allow that to happen.
Hi, if you're a fan of my adviser, Pam Samuelson, and her scholarship, then you'd probably like to know that there is a feed for her paper page (where she posts her forthcoming papers): http://feed43.com/pam-samuelson-papers.xml
The old feed had fallen into disrepair. This one is largely automated by Feed43, which has a nifty, if hard to learn at first, way of parsing page contents into feeds.
One of the true innovations in computer-mediated voting in recent years is the development of the ballot marking device. A number of vendors have developed devices that essentially act like large expensive pens. These devices allow people with disabilities to interact privately and independently with a touchscreen, ADA-compliant voting interface to mark a normal optical scan ballot while people without disabilities can fill out the same optical scan ballot by hand.
Vogue Election Systems, Inc. and AutoMARK Technical Systems, LLC are the most successful ballot marking device developers with their AutoMARK Voter Assist Terminal (above, at right). It was only natural, I suppose, that they seek to patent their innovation. Eugene M. Cummings of AutoMARK Technical Systems, LLC was awarded patent no. 7,080,779 for a ballot marking device on 25 July 2006 (filed 11 Dec. 2003). Here is the patent's page on the USPTO's site (or in a shorter URL: http://tinyurl.com/ew7pv). Here are the patent images turned into a 5.1MB PDF: http://josephhall.org/tmp/AutoMARK_patent_7080779.pdf
This will make it much more difficult for other vendors to develop their own similar ballot marking device and could pose problems for non-profit groups (like the Open Voting Consortium) which might be developing ballot-marking devices or devices based on similar architectures. I hope AutoMARK TS, Inc., is open to licensing their technology, and hopefully at reduced royalties for non-profit groups. Seeing as how they've signed exclusive marketing and manufacturing agreements with Election Systems and Software (ES&S) and how competitive the voting systems market is, I'm not holding my breath.
The EFF turns 16 today... if you appreciate the work that they have done and continue to do in the realm of digital rights, please consider making a recurring donation (donate a small amount each month so that they know they can count on your support) to EFF.
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