For the balance of A quad, we will be focused on matters of property, privacy, and control.
We do not have a class meeting next week. So you will have additional reading to do, and you are to turn in a response to these readings next Monday. Email your comments on the first question below to the class, or add them to the class wiki.
You have two assignments for this week.
How do we describe intellectual and online property? What is significant about it? What is differnet?
You may find it helpful to read selected other chapters of [Les06].
See the class page online for pointers to the readings and to a much more extensive collection of readings.
2 Feb update: As we prepare for our next class meeting, add the selections from chapter eight of the textbook. The first one, regarding cultural differences, you may wish to read less closely than the others.
In addition, find news articles regarding laws known as SOPA and PIPA and the treaty ACTA. (For information about the U.S. and ACTA, you may need to look back a couple of years.) Find articles that will qualify as news or analysis, not opinion.
[Man98] was written before DMCA was enacted. As an update, read [Tou01] and [Vai02] (noting that both are opinion pieces). I’ll be looking for good starting points, but you might see if you can find out about one early civil case (usually referred to as Felten v. RIAA) and an criminal case (involving a programmer named Dmitry Skylarov). In particular, we would want to find the best record we can of the facts in both cases.
The big questions we want to tackle in class this week are around the nature of intellectual property and what sort of regime for managing it would be just (and why). We should also sketch a rough picture of how intellectual property is (and has been) managed under U.S. law. You might find it helpful to try writing a rough paragraph or two on these before class; feel free to email those as your response to the readings, and feel free to share your thoughts (and questions) on the wiki.