Law in the Internet Society
Professor Eben Moglen
Columbia Law School
Fall 2021
On December 8, we conclude. Please watch Moglen & Choudhary, The Last Kilometer, The Last Chance, re:Publica 2016
Sometime thereafter, I would like to receive the first draft of your second essay. See SecondEssay for the template.
See ClassAudio for all class recordings.
Please keep up with what's On The Radar.
Writing schedule:
First drafts of your second essay will be due Dec 8th. Rewrites of both first and second essays will be due Jan 9th. If you wish an extension beyond Jan 9, please send me
email to request one.
Extended office hours will be held, in room 642, the week of December 13. Hours will be Wednesday, 11:30am-5:30pm and Thursday, 12:30pm-5:00pm.
Beginning September 15, my office hours in fall 2021, under epidemic conditions, are held
Wednesday 12n-1:30pm and Thursday 12n-2pm and by
videoconference at other times by appointment. To make an appointment, please email
moglen@columbia.edu, or consult my
assistant,
Jerrica Sosa, at
212-461-1905, Mon-Thu.
On the Radar
Johann Hari,
Your attention didn't collapse. It was stolen, The Guardian, January 2, 2022
Timnit Gebru,
For truly ethical AI, its research must be independent from big tech, The Guardian, December 6, 2021
Rebecca Ratcliffe,
Social media creating virus of lies, says Nobel winner Maria Ressa, The Guardian, November 18, 2021
Shoshana Zuboff,
You Are the Object of a Secret Extraction Operation, New York Times, Nov. 12, 2021
Ayad Akhtar,
The Singularity Is Here, The Atlantic, November 5, 2021
Ethan Zuckerman,
Hey Facebook, I Made a Metaverse 27 Years Ago, The Atlantic, October 29, 2021
WhyNotVideoConferencing
Simon Usborne,
Intimate data: can a person who tracks their steps, sleep and food ever truly be free?, The Guardian, October 5, 2021
Leah Nylen,
Facebook paid billions extra to the FTC to spare Zuckerberg in data suit, shareholders allege, Politico, September 21, 2021
Brian X. Chen,
The Battle for Digital Privacy Is Reshaping the Internet New York Times, September 21, 2021
Ryan Mac and Sheera Frenkel,
No More Apologies: Inside Facebook's Push to Defend Its Image, New York Times, September 21, 2021
Francis Fukuyama, Barak Richman, and Ashish Goel,
How to Save Democracy From Technology: Ending Big Tech's Information Monopoly, Foreign Affairs, January/February 2021
Richard Speed,
Privacy campaigner flags concerns about Microsoft's creepy Productivity Score, The Register, November 26, 2020
Anna Wiener,
Taking Back Our Privacy, The New Yorker, October 26, 2020
Steve Lohr,
IBM, Seeing Its Future in the Cloud, Breaks Off I.T. Unit, NY Times, October 8, 2020
Alex Hern,
How Excel may have caused loss of 16,000 Covid tests in England, The Guardian, October 5, 2020
Patrick Wintour,
Oxford moves to protect students from China's Hong Kong security law, The Guardian, September 28, 2020
Josh Simons and Dipayan Ghosh,
Utilities for democracy: Why and how the algorithmic infrastructure of Facebook and Google must be regulated, Foreign Policy, August 2020
Sue Halpern,
The Trump Campaign’s Mobile App Is Collecting Massive Amounts of Voter Data, The New Yorker, September 13, 2020
GPT-3,
A Robot Wrote This Entire Article. Are You Scared Yet, Human?, The Guardian, September 8, 2020
Julia Jacobs,
Natural History Museum Union Files Complaint Over Coronavirus App, New York Times, August 26, 2020
Paul Lewis,
'Our minds can be hijacked': the tech insiders who fear a smartphone dystopia, The Guardian, October 6, 2017
Eben Moglen and Mishi Choudhary,
Zuckerberg Nobly Carries White Man's Burden: Poor Indians' Data Packets, Indian Express, October 30, 2015
Jim Dwyer,
Volkswagen's Diesel Fraud Makes Critic of Secret Code a Prophet, September 22, 2015
Eben Moglen,
Transcript: When Software is in Everything: Future Liability Nightmares Free Software Helps Avoid, June 30, 2010
People Love Spying On One Another: A Q & A With Facebook Critic Eben Moglen, Washington Post, November 19, 2014
Watch: IASC & the Elinor Ostrom Award,
Commons In Action (2014)
atockar,
Riding with the Stars: Passenger Privacy in the NYC Taxicab Dataset, Neustar Research, September 15, 2014
A Word on Technology Old and New About the Word
This seminar is an attempt to learn about, understand and predict the development of law in a rapidly changing area. We must assemble the field of knowledge relevant to our questions even as we begin trying to answer them. Wiki technology is an ideal match for the work we have in hand. Below you will find an introduction to this particular wiki, or TWiki, where you can learn as much or as little about how this technology works as you want.
For now, the most important thing is just that any page of the wiki has an edit button, and your work in the course consists of writings that we will collaboratively produce here. You can make new pages, edit existing pages, attach files to any page, add links, leave comments in the comment boxes--whatever in your opinion adds to a richer dialog. During the semester I will assign writing exercises, which will also be posted here. All of everyone's work contributes to a larger and more informative whole, which is what our conversation is informed by, and helps us to understand.
Please begin by
registering. I look forward to seeing you at our first meeting on the 10th.
Introduction to the LawNetSoc Web
The LawNetSoc site is a collaborative class space built on
Twiki [twiki.org], a free software wiki system. If this is your first time using a wiki for a long term project, or first time using a wiki at all, you might want to take a minute and look around this site. If you see something on the page that you don't know how to create in a wiki, take a look at the text that produced it using the "Edit" button at the top of each page, and feel free to try anything out in the
Sandbox.
All of the Twiki documentation is also right at hand. Follow the
TWiki link in the sidebar. There are a number of good tutorials and helpful FAQs there explaining the basics of
what a wiki does,
how to use Twiki, and
how to format text.
From TWiki's point of view, this course, Law in the Internet Society, is one "web." There are other webs here: the sandbox for trying wiki experiments, for example, and my other courses, etc. You're welcome to look around in those webs too, of course. Below are some useful tools for dealing with this particular web of ours. You can see the list of recent changes, and you can arrange to be notified of changes, either by email or by RSS feed. I would strongly recommend that you sign up for one or another form of notification; if not, it is your responsibility to keep abreast of the
changes yourself.
LawNetSoc Web Utilities