Computers and Society

"Benjamin Franzen and Kembrew McLeod's exceptionally smart and energetic documentary lays out the complexities of sampling, artistic and political, legal and philosophical. Comprised of split screens, overlapping and overlaid sounds, an assemblage of images and noise, the movie effectively stages its argument even as it makes it."
-PopMatters.com

Legendary remixer Steve "Steinski" Stein, the inspiration for many recent artists including Girl Talk, will join producer Kembrew McLeod for the Q&A session after the screening. This event is sponsored by ISOC-NY, FreeCulture NYU , NYU ACM, Brooklyn Law Incubator & Policy Clinic, and tech@nyu.

Eben Moglen, Professor of Law and Legal History at Columbia University, and founder, Director-Counsel and Chairman of the Software Freedom Law Center, will speak about “Freedom in the Cloud: Software Freedom, Privacy and Security for Web 2.0 and Cloud Computing” on Friday, February 5, 2010, 7-9 pm. This event will be webcast live. This event is sponsored by ISOC-NY, NYU ACM, and Brooklyn Law Incubator & Policy Clinic

Memefactory is a performance for anyone who uses the internet. Whether you are perplexed by pictures of cats with awful spelling or spend over 9000 hours a week surfing image boards, we promise you'll either learn something or explode from overexposure to lulz. Sponsored by NYU's ACM Chapter and Free Culture @NYU

Bollier will discuss his new book, Viral Spiral, the first comprehensive history of the "free culture" movement and "sharing economy" that is empowering ordinary people, disrupting markets and changing politics and culture. Bollier is a leading American activist, author, blogger and proponent of "free culture" on the Internet and the commons. He is an editor of Onthecommons.org and Senior Fellow at the USC Annenberg School for Communication.

The goal of this conference was to outline the history of the last 25 years, discuss the current market issues, then give a view of the future of broadband and telecom in the US that has been mostly untold in the media. It is a future that leads to ubiquitous, very high speed networks based on an infrastructure that is open to all competitors ? giving customers choice, lower prices and new quality products and innovative services. And widely acknowledged as critical for long term economic growth.

Michel Bauwens is the founder of the Foundation for Peer-to-Peer Alternatives, a global research collaborative exploring peer production, governance, and property. He is currently Primavera Research Fellow at the University of Amsterdam and external expert at the Pontifical Academy of Social Sciences (2008). In his lecture, he argues that organizations that are structured like networks will out-compete traditional centralized organizations in the new green capitalism.

Andrew Rasiej is a social entrepreneur, Founder of Personal Democracy Forum, and co-founder of techPresident. He has served as an adviser to Senator Barack Obama, Senator Hillary Clinton, Senator Tom Daschle, Congressman Dick Gephardt, the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee and the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee on the use of Information Technology for campaign and policy purposes. Mr. Rasiej also maintains the position of senior technology adviser for the Sunlight Foundation.

Released in December 2007 by the League of Noble Peers (Alan Toner, J.J. King, Jan Gerber, Sebastian Luetgert, Luca Lucarini, and others), Steal This Film 2 tries to go beyond the current discussions around file-sharing to look at what kinds of social change are precipitated by massive changes in our capacity to communicate. The film argues that the changes wrought by networked, peer distribution are historical on the scale of the printing press and tries to explain why.

Amanda Michel is Director of OffTheBus, citizen-powered political journalism. Since 2003 she has worked as National Director of Generation Dean, created and managed the MediaCorps program for the Kerry-Edwards campaign, co-founded the New Organizing Institute in the wake of the 2004 election, worked at Harvard's Berkman Center for Internet & Society, and worked on Assignment Zero, a Wired and NewAssignment.net collaboration.

The content industry has convinced industry in general that extremism in copyright regulation is good for business and economic growth. That's false. In this talk, Professor Lessig describes the creative and profitable future that culture and industry could realize, if only we gave up IP extremism.

Winner of the first Neil Postman award for Career Achievement in Public Intellectual Activity, Douglas Rushkoff is an author of ten best-selling books, a professor at NYU's Interactive Telecommunications Program and an award-winning documentarian who focuses on the ways people, cultures, and institutions create, share, and influence each other's values. His talk examined the cultural, historical, and economic developments that created our current system of governance, and outlined a path to open source democracy.

John Perry Barlow, American poet, essayist, and cyberactivist, explored the notion that the 2008 presidential election was the first true "Internet Election".

Fred Benenson, co-founder of Free Culture @ NYU, organizer of the first-of-their-kind DRM protests in 2005, and Cultural Programs Associate for Creative Commons in New York City, gave two lectures. The first discussed the effect of Copyright on creativity. The second discussed the Creative Commons and Free Culture movements.

Tim Westergren founded Pandora in January 2000 and now serves as its Chief Strategy Officer. Tim is an award winning composer, an accomplished musician and a record producer with 20 years of experience in the music industry. In his talk, he discussed the history of Pandora, and what happens when old content laws come up against the realities of the Internet.

OneWebDay has attracted a global network of partner organizations and individual activists committed to broadening the public's awareness of Internet and Web issues while deepening a culture of participation in building a Web that works for everyone.

Speaking at this event: Susan Crawford (founder - One Web Day) | Sree Sreenivasan (Columbia Journalism & WNBC-TV) |Andrew Baron (Rocketboom) | Craig Newmark (craigslist) | Dharma Dailey (Ethos Group) | Gale A. Brewer (NYC Council) | SJ Klein (OLPC) | Jonathan Zittrain (Harvard) | John Perry Barlow (EFF) | Tim Westergren (Pandora) | Lawrence Lessig (Stanford)

The 2008 elections mark a transformation of American politics as the internet and new media change the way millions get news and share information. From social networking to YouTube, industry leaders and trailblazers talk about how the rules of engagement are changing. You are invited to join a ground-breaking discussion on the role of new media in the 2008 elections. Media innovators will gather to talk about how the internet and digital media are transforming American politics, and what we should expect as the 2008 presidential campaigns continue.

Edward Hasbrouck is the author of the Practical Nomad series, a travel expert, award winning investigative journalist, and one of the world's leading advocates for the rights of travelers. Hasbrouck has more than 15 years experience as a travel industry insider and technology consultant, specializing in international airfares and reservations technology. He will discuss travel, especially air travel, and the current debates about ``homeland security'' technologies and practices since September 11th, 2001. Are the differences between travel records and other types of personal data (medical, financial, criminal) technological? Political? Both? Is the issue a ``balance'' between security and civil liberties, privacy and safety? Or is there some other agenda and set of interests at stake? This event is sponsored by Free Culture @NYU, NYU ACM, WinC, and InfoLaw/NYU.

Rosen teaches journalism at New York University, where he has been on the faculty since 1986. Rosen is the author of PressThink, a weblog about journalism and its ordeals (www.pressthink.org), which he introduced in September 2003. By March 2007, it had received 2 million visits. In June 2005, PressThink won the Reporters Without Borders 2005 Freedom Blog award for outstanding defense of free expression. In 1999, Yale University Press published Rosen's book, "What Are Journalists For?", which is about the rise of the civic journalism movement.

Stallman will discuss the goals and philosophy of the Free Software Movement, and the status and history of the GNU operating system, which in combination with the kernel Linux, is now used by tens of millions of users worldwide. This event is sponsored by Free Culture @NYU, NYU ACM, WinC, and InfoLaw/NYU.

Cory co-edits the massively popular BoingBoing.net (the internet's second most popular blog according to technorati.com), writes sci-fi novels that are released under Creative Commons licenses, and is a dedicated copyfighter who serves on the board of numerous organizations

Jimmy Wales, founder of Wikipedia, will give a brief background on open source software, how it works, and the fact that you can be commercially successful doing and using it. He will also discuss Wikia and the Wikimedia Foundation.

The DMCA is one of the most controversial laws in copyright. It not only forbids picking the digital locks that protect against copyrighted works, but also forbids anyone to explain how to pick digital locks. While many consider the DMCA unconstitutional, others simply accept it as a bad law that creators and activists must work around. Join us as James Boyle and Free Culture @NYU ask whether or not the DMCA is worth fighting over, and what we're risking by paying too close attention to it.

Peter Bergen is a fellow at the New America Foundation in Washington, D.C., an Adjunct Professor at the School of Advanced International Studies at Johns Hopkins University, and CNN's terrorism analyst. Bergen will talk about how the jihadist movement morphed after 9/11, becoming more virtual, less organized and less hierarchical. And what we can expect from Al Qaeda 2.0 in the future. This event is sponsored by Free Culture @NYU, NYU ACM, and WinC.