The Politics of Digital Piracy

Syllabus

Week 0: Introduction

Week 1: Law

Assignments:

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

• Richard Stallman. Misinterpreting Copyright - A Series of Errors

• Copyright Overview (Stanford University Libraries)

Week 2: Privacy and Surveillance

Assignments:

• Laura Poitras. Surveillance Teach-In (at Whitney Biennial)

Suggested:

• Glenn Greenwald. XKeyscore (The Guardian)

• The Tor Project

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

Week 3: Hacking

Assignments:

• Brian Harvey. What is a Hacker?

Suggested:

• TPB AFK: The Pirate Bay Away From Keyboard

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

• Gabriella Coleman. Coding Freedom: The Ethics and Aesthetics of Hacking

Week 4: P2P

Assignments:

• Adrian Johns. Pop music pirate hunters

Suggested:

• Defining P2P as the relational dynamic of distributed networks (P2P Foundation)

Week 5: Copyleft and Open Licensing

Assignments:

• What is Copyleft? (Free Software Foundation)

• Guide to Open Licensing (Open Knowledge Foundation)

Suggested:

• Richard Stallman. The GNU Manifesto

• Creative Commons

Week 6: Midterm Presentations

No Assignments

Week 7: Art and Remix

Assignments:

• RiP: A Remix Manifesto

Suggested:

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

Week 8: Science and DIY

Assignments:

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

• Ritchie King. When Breakthroughs Begin at Home (The New York Times)

Suggested:

• Notes on FASTR (Harvard Open Access Project)

• Aaron Swartz. Guerilla Open Access Manifesto

Week 9: Code and Collaboration

Assignments:

• Try to explore GitHub (it's ok to be lost)

Suggested:

• Christopher Kelty. Two Bits: The Cultural Significance of Free Software

Week 10: Cool Stuff Show n Tell

Assignments:

• Give an outline/summary of Project 1

Week 11: Democracy

Assignments:

• Clay Shirky. How the Internet will (one day) transform government (at TED)

Suggested:

• Yochai Benkler. Wealth of Networks (Chapter 3)

Week 12: Implications of Recent Law and Policy Makers

Week 13: Future and Wrap-Up

Assignments:

• Peer-to-Peer Politics: Moving Beyond Left and Right (at MIT Media Lab)

Week 14: Final Presentations