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Starting with just 50 million Creative Commons-licensed works in 2006, the number burgeoned to 882 million licensed works by 2014. The project set about creating the tools that could enable creators to freely share their copyrighted works with the public. For example, in 2002 after a long-winded battle in the courts that culminated in a Supreme Court decision extending the life of some copyrighted works by 20 years, an early member of the Berkman Klein Center community, Lawrence Lessig, began what is now Creative Commons. Pivoting to the Center’s work, Zittrain mentioned a few projects along the Center’s timeline that have held true to these values. Nonetheless, openness, weirdness and big-thinking remain vital for innovation and help to shape the past, present and future of research institutions like the Berkman Klein Center. Revelations of bugs, vulnerabilities and human error can challenge the arguments for an open internet, especially as technologies become more centralized.
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Of course, that’s not to say that the technology is perfect, Zittrain said. “And that weirdness is in the bones of technology, it’s in the engineers who helped make it, and it’s in many of the uses of the technology as well.” “So it’s weird, the status quo,” said Zittrain. Instead, it’s the public that can be trusted to protect, and invent good uses for the new technology. Such a generative environment is unique, Zittrain has said, because it is built on the collective illusion that the system is never fully complete and there is no central authority.
JONATHAN BERKMAN KLEIN CENTER SOFTWARE
We believe in rough consensus and running code.”Īccording to Zittrain, it’s also the same ethos that fostered the invention of Napster, the growth of the personal computer, and the one-man band that founded OpenSSL, a software library that grew to be used by two-thirds of web servers. As David Clark once said of the standard-setting Internet Engineering Task Force: “We reject kings, presidents, and voting. It’s visible in the early groups that helped to maintain and improve the internet.
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This “generative” spirit, a term used by Zittrain to mean the promotion of innovation and disruption, is in the technological backbone of the internet, which has no central server but instead allows anyone to connect via the nearest node. Miraculously, this open environment thrived and generated a crowd of like-minded and playful network nerds, whose energy manifested itself in all layers of the internet. Instead, the internet was a cobbled-together experiment by a group of academic researchers who rejected regime structures and preserved an experimental spirit that invited sharing and open access. From its launch, the internet was aimed differently from proprietary networks, which sought to control and wall off their gardens. In a salutation to the newly-named Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society, and a salute to the new and old members of the community, co-founder and Harvard Law School professor Jonathan Zittrain asked his audience during a talk last week, “Why does the internet matter?” The answer, it seems, quite fittingly parallels the history, mission and ethos of the Berkman Klein Center at Harvard University.Īccording to Zittrain, it’s a story of weirdos that began with the invention of the internet in the mid-1900s.