May 2010

Gina Trapani and Anil Dash on Expert Labs and ThinkTank

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Gina Trapani, blogger, author, software developer, and creator of ThinkTank, and Anil Dash, director of Expert Labs and blogging pioneer, talk about Expert Labs, an organization that seeks to improve government by letting policy makers tap into the collective wisdom of the public, and ThinkTank, an open source tool that the White House is using to crowdsource and sort policy ideas, insights, and recommendations offered through social media platforms like Twitter and Facebook.

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Adam Thierer on the future of media

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Adam Thierer, president of The Progress & Freedom Foundation and the Director of its Center for Digital Media Freedom, discusses the future of media. He explains recent proposals by government commissions and Congress that would proactively prop up media and journalism. Thierer also outlines problems with the proposals, such as threats to free speech and separation of press and state. He also addresses newspapers as non-profits, shared experiences vs. diversity, and journalism ethics in the context of the recently scooped iPhone.

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David Post on the state of the internet

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David Post, the I. Herman Stern Professor of Law at the Beasley School of Law at Temple University and author of In Search of Jefferson’s Moose: Notes on the State of Cyberspace, discusses the general state of the internet. He contrasts a decentralized Jeffersonian approach to the internet with a more centralized Hamiltonian one and also addresses netizenship, open vs. closed source, and online global relations.

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Tyler Cowen on how the internet changes everything

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Tyler Cowen, professor of economics at George Mason University, general director of the Mercatus Center, and founder of the popular economics blog Marginal Revolution, discusses how the internet influences and changes practically everything. The conversation broadly centers on how the web allows us to find, distill, and sort information as never before, which has profoundly affected people’s consumption of culture and creation of their own economies. Tyler touches on LOST and Battlestar Gallactica, the iPad and the publishing industry, old and new media, Facebook, Twitter, ChatRoulette, and his favorite things on the internet.

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Wendy Seltzer on delegated censorship, copyright, and the DMCA

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Wendy Seltzer, a fellow with the Silicon Flatirons Center for Law, Technology, and Entrepreneurship at the University of Colorado and with the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard Law School discusses copyright infringement and the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. The discussion also turns to the relationship between copyright law and free speech protected by the First Amendment.

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