Law in the Internet Society

Law in the Internet Society

Professor Eben Moglen
Columbia Law School
Fall 2024

Please read Shoshona Zuboff's Age of Surveillance Capitalism.

On October 9, we will begin the discussion of copyleft and its consequences. Please finish reading AnarchistsAuthorsOwners.


Please keep up with what's On the Radar.

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Beginning September 10, my office hours in Fall 2024 are TWR 12:30-2pm and 5-6:15pm. If you want to see me outside those hours, please email moglen@columbia.edu.

On the Radar

Emmett Lindner, As 23andMe Struggles, Concerns Surface About Its Genetic Data, New York Times, October 5, 2024

Sarah Krouse, Dustin Volz, Aruna Viswanatha and Robert McMillan, U.S. Wiretap Systems Targeted in China-Linked Hack, Wall Street Journal, October 5, 2024 (alternate link)

Rose Horowitch, The Elite College Students Who Can't Read Books, The Atlantic, October 1, 2024 (alternate link)

Cecilia Kang, F.T.C. Study Finds ‘Vast Surveillance’ of Social Media Users, New York Times, September 19, 2024

Douglas Hofstadter, Lucky You!, The Atlantic, September 17, 2024 (alternate link)

Noam Chomsky, Ian Roberts and Jeffrey Watumull, The False Promise of ChatGPT, New York Times, March 8, 2023

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

People Love Spying On One Another: A Q & A With Facebook Critic Eben Moglen, Washington Post, November 19, 2014


Primary Readings

The most important book to read this term is Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power (2019). Because it is 700 pages long, you will try not to, but you must.

The second most important is Sherry Turkle, Alone Together: Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Other (2012).

For access, see ReadingList.

Topics

Introduction, Political Economy:
The Way We Live Now

Sociology, Economics, Legal Theory:
Grasping the Net

Copyright and Other Intellectual Improperty:
Anarchists, Authors, and Owners

Carriage Regulation:
Controlling the Switches

Privacy in Private and Public Law:
The State, The Spook, The Cop, Her Wife, and His Lover

Eyes Wide Shut:
Taboo Enforcement and Free Expression

Making Broadcasters Unconstitutional:
Rethinking Media Law

Electronic Democracy:
Restructuring Politics


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 6th.

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

Navigation

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r361 - 06 Oct 2024 - 10:15:45 - EbenMoglen
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