The Politics of Digital Piracy

Syllabus

Week 1: Introduction

Assignments:

• Lawrence Lessig. Aaron's Laws - Law and Justice in a Digital Age (Harvard Law School, 2012)

Week 2: Law

Assignments:

• Brian Harvey. What is a Hacker? University of California, Berkeley

• The Hacker Crackdown: Law and Disorder on the Electronic Frontier

Suggested:

• TPB AFK: The Pirate Bay Away From Keyboard

• Coding Freedom: The Ethics and Aesthetics of Hacking

Hackerspaces:

• Noisebridge (San Francisco),

• Sudo Room (Oakland)

Week 3: Hack

Assignments:

• What is Copyleft? GNU Project- Free Software Foundation

• Guide to Open Licensing Knowledge Foundation. Richard Stallman.

• The GNU Manifesto

Alternative licenses: - Creative Commons

Week 4: Copyleft and Open Licensing

Assignments

Open source projects:

• GitHub

Christopher Kelty.

• Two Bits: The Cultural Significance of Free Software

Week 5: Code

Assignments:

• Adrian Johns. History of Musical Piracy and P2P Technology Pop Music Pirate Hunters.

P2P Foundation.

• Defining P2P as the relational dynamic of distributed networks

Suggested:

• Alexander Galloway. Protocol: How Control Exists after Decentralization

Week 6: P2P

Assignments:

• Give an outline/summary of Project 1

Week 7: Cool Stuff Show n Tell

No Assignments

Week 8: midterm presentations

Assignments:

• Brett Gaylor (video). RiP: A Remix Manifesto

Suggested:

• Walter Benjamin. The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction

Week 9: Art

Assignments:

• Michael Eisen. The Past, Present and Future of Scholarly Publishing

• When Breakthroughs Begin at Home

Suggested Reading

• Harvard Open Access Project. Notes on FASTR

• Aaron Swartz. Guerilla Open Access Manifesto

• Timothy Gowers. Is massively collaborative mathematics possible?

Week 10: Science

Assignments:

• Clay Shirky. TED

• Yochai Benkler. Wealth of Networks

Week 11: Government

Assingments:

• http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s976iyaO39A (Laura Poitras: Surveillance Teach-In) WikiLeaks.

Wiretapping:

• Hepting v. AT&T (Electronic Frontier Foundation)

Anonymity:

• The Tor Project

Suggested:

• Transcript of secret meeting between Julian Assange and Google CEO Eric Schmidt

Week 12: Privacy/ Surveillance

Assignment:

• Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act (H.R. 3523) Access control:

• DRM

Suggested

• Yoshai Benkler. Wealth of Networks

Week 13: Implications of Recent Law and Policy Makers

Assignments:

• Steven Johnson, Yochai Benkler, Susan Crawford & Lawrence Lessig. Peer-to-Peer Politics: Moving Beyond Left and Right (at MIT Media Lab)

Suggested:

• Gilles Deleuze & Félix Guattari. A Thousand Plateaus

Week 14: Future

Week 15: Final Presentations