Upcoming Conferences - Past Conferences
The last several years have witnessed the coalescing of the Access-To-Knowledge (A2K) social movement that champions human rights, human development, and the public interest as the focal points of innovation and information policy.
Yale’s ISP 2006 Access to Knowledge (A2K) conference advanced our commitment to building a broad conceptual framework of "Access to Knowledge" that can foster powerful coalitions between diverse groups. The A2k conference brought together over 300 leading scholars and activists from over 40 countries to participate in the construction of an intellectual framework for access to knowledge. Full conference proceedings and foundational resources for Access to Knowledge are available at the Yale A2K conference wiki.
This year, on April 27th-29th 2007, the weekend of World Intellectual Property Day, the A2K2 conference will be a pivotal event mobilizing the A2K coalition. A2K2 will further build the coalition amongst the institutions and stakeholders that crystallized at the first landmark conference, help set the agenda for access to knowledge policy and advocacy, and deepen the understanding of the theoretical underpinnings of access to knowledge issues. Developing both a theoretical framework and delving into the details of practical implementation, the program will focus on mobilizing the private sector, governments, technologists, and civil society around A2K issues. A2K2's policy panels will be structured towards tangible legal and technological solutions and collaborative strategies for policy makers and individual institutions.
Technological design is political. In a digitally networked environment, technical decisions about the infrastructure of information and communications technologies (ICT) can have a broad impact on public policy, innovation, and economic growth. The decisions governing these developing systems are increasingly being promulgated in the form of standards. Technical standards are usually not established by legislatures or elected representatives, but increasingly play the mediating role of those institutions in resolving social tensions, such as access to information versus property rights and law enforcement versus individual civil liberties. Standards, once entrenched, can endure longer than other policy mechanisms because of user investments, product development investments, institutional commitments, and preservation of industry hegemony among powerful stakeholders. Economically, the intellectual property arrangements underlying standards determine the competitive openness of certain technology markets and intersect directly with global trade issues. On a technical level, recent interoperability problems in government services such as disaster response have prompted renewed political interest in open standards. In response, governments have established or renewed technical strategies based on open standards. Despite the significance of open standards in the global ICT context, even the meaning of openness is a contentious topic. This conference, the first to address global open standards issues from an academic perspective, has three objectives:Shed light on the controversial and value-laden concepts of openness, interoperability, democratic participation, and competitiveness in the context of standards. Afford an opportunity for political and economic stakeholders to find common ground on open standards. Begin to craft a theoretical framework exploring the concepts of open standards in the larger context of technology, markets, politics, and law.
In the digital era, most multinational corporations and policymakers are of the view that the current trend characterised by increasing intellectual property rights and corporate control over knowledge best serve society's interests. At the same time, however, a growing number of commentators believe that widespread access to knowledge (A2K) and the preservation of a healthy knowledge commons are the real basis for sustainable human development. Nonetheless, intellectual property-based approaches continue to singlehandedly dictate global legal norms and shape national legal infrastructures.
The first goal of the Yale A2K Initiative is to come up with a new analytic framework for analysing the possibly distortive effects of public policies relying exclusively on intellectual property rights. Beyond this aim, the A2K initiative seeks to support the adoption and development of alternative ways to foster greater access to knowledge in the digitally connected environment.
The landmark A2K conference at Yale Law School will bring together leading thinkers and activists on access to knowledge policy from North and South, in order to generate concrete research agendas and policy solutions for the next decade. This conference will be among the first to synthesize the multifaceted and interdisciplinary aspects of access to knowledge, ranging from textbooks and telecommunications access to software and medicines. The A2K Conference aims to help build an intellectual framework that will protect access to knowledge both as the basis for sustainable human development and to safeguard human rights.
Patterns of information flow are one of the most important factors shaping globalization. Today individuals, groups, countries, and international organizations are trying to promote and control the flow of different kinds of information across national borders; information ranging from intellectual property and scientific research to political discourse, brand names and cultural symbols. And digitally networked environments subject information to ever new methods of distribution and manipulation. Fights over information flow are going to help define who holds power in the global information economy. This conference explored these emerging patterns of information flow, and their political, economic, social, and cultural consequences.
Regulating Search? was the first academic conference devoted to search engines and the law. The symposium will bring together technologists, policymakers, entrepreneurs, executives, lawyers, computer scientists, and activists to discuss the emerging field of search engine law. It will examine trends in litigation involving search engines, identify the interests that are implicated by the increasing legal control of search, and discuss appropriate public policy responses.
State of Play III: Social Revolutions was the third annual State of Play conference on the future of cyberspace convened by the Institute for Information Law & Policy at New York Law School, the Information Society Project at Yale Law School, and the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard Law School. This year, we focused on social relationships in the metaverse and how to build vibrant, flourishing, creative places.
Digital Mix, a one-of-a-kind musical event, brings the avant-garde of music to the future of law in the digital age.
The State of Play, an annual conference sponsored by New York Law School and Yale Law School, explores the next frontier in the evolution of cyberspace: virtual worlds.
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we will bring together game designers, lawyers, academics, and artists to discuss the complex social, psychological, and legal issues to which games give rise.
This international collaboration aims to promote democracy by studying how new technologies can promote democratic deliberation, participation, and decisionmaking. We are interested in realizing technology's potential to improve civic life and help citizens take and active and informed role in their own governance.
The Democracy in Cyberspace Initiative
The first academic program on Web Logs
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