The Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society is a research center at

Harvard University Harvard University is a private Ivy League research university in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Founded in 1636 as Harvard College and named for its first benefactor, the Puritan clergyman John Harvard, it is the oldest institution of higher le ...

that focuses on the study of

cyberspace Cyberspace is a concept describing a widespread interconnected digital technology. "The expression dates back from the first decade of the diffusion of the internet. It refers to the online world as a world 'apart', as distinct from everyday rea ...

. Founded at

Harvard Law School Harvard Law School (Harvard Law or HLS) is the law school of Harvard University, a private research university in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Founded in 1817, it is the oldest continuously operating law school in the United States. Each class ...

, the center traditionally focused on internet-related legal issues. On May 15, 2008, the center was elevated to an interfaculty initiative of Harvard University as a whole. It is named after the Berkman family. On July 5, 2016, the center added "Klein" to its name following a gift of $15 million from Michael R. Klein.

History and mission

The center was founded in 1996 as the "Center on Law and Technology" by

Jonathan Zittrain Jonathan L. Zittrain (born December 24, 1969) is an American professor of Internet law and the George Bemis Professor of International Law at Harvard Law School. He is also a professor at the Harvard Kennedy School, a professor of computer scie ...

and Professor

Charles Nesson Charles Rothwell Nesson (born February 11, 1939) is the William F. Weld Professor of Law at Harvard Law School and the founder of the Berkman Center for Internet & Society and of the Global Poker Strategic Thinking Society. He is author of ''E ...

. This built on previous work including a 1994 seminar they held on legal issues involving the early Internet. Professor Arthur Miller and students David Marglin and Tom Smuts also worked on that seminar and related discussions. In 1997, the Berkman family underwrote the center, and

Lawrence Lessig Lester Lawrence Lessig III (born June 3, 1961) is an American academic, attorney, and political activist. He is the Roy L. Furman Professor of Law at Harvard Law School and the former director of the Edmond J. Safra Center for Ethics at Harvard ...

joined as the first Berkman professor. In 1998, the center changed its name to the "Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard Law School." Since then, it has grown from a small project within

to a major interdisciplinary center at Harvard University. The Berkman Klein Center seeks to understand how the development of Internet-related technologies is inspired by the social context in which they are embedded and how the use of those technologies affects society in turn. It seeks to use the lessons drawn from this research to inform the design of Internet-related law and pioneer the development of the Internet itself. The Berkman Klein Center sponsors Internet-related events and conferences, and hosts numerous visiting lecturers and research fellows. Members of the center teach, write books, scientific articles,

weblog A blog (a truncation of "weblog") is a discussion or informational website published on the World Wide Web consisting of discrete, often informal diary-style text entries (posts). Posts are typically displayed in reverse chronological order ...

s with RSS 2.0 feeds (for which the Center holds the specification), and

podcast A podcast is a program made available in digital format for download over the Internet. For example, an episodic series of digital audio or video files that a user can download to a personal device to listen to at a time of their choosing ...

s (of which the first series took place at the Berkman Klein Center). Its newsletter, ''The Buzz'', is on the Web and available by e-mail, and it hosts a blog community of Harvard faculty, students, and Berkman Klein Center affiliates. The Berkman Klein Center faculty and staff have also conducted major public policy reviews of pressing issues. In 2008,

John Palfrey John Gorham Palfrey VII (born 1972) is an American educator, scholar, and law professor. He is an authority on the legal aspects of emerging media and an advocate for Internet freedom, including increased online transparency and accountability ...

led a review of child safety online called the Internet Safety Technical Task Force. In 2009,

Yochai Benkler Yochai Benkler (; born 1964) is an Israeli-American author and the Berkman Professor of Entrepreneurial Legal Studies at Harvard Law School. He is also a faculty co-director of the Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society at Harvard Universi ...

led a review of United States broadband policy. In 2010, Urs Gasser, along with Palfrey and others, led a review of Internet governance body

ICANN The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN ) is an American multistakeholder group and nonprofit organization responsible for coordinating the maintenance and procedures of several databases related to the namespaces ...

, focusing on transparency, accountability, and public participation.

Projects and initiatives

The Berkman Klein Center's main research topics are Teens and Media,

Monitoring Monitoring may refer to: Science and technology Biology and healthcare * Monitoring (medicine), the observation of a disease, condition or one or several medical parameters over time * Baby monitoring * Biomonitoring, of toxic chemical compounds, ...

Privacy Privacy (, ) is the ability of an individual or group to seclude themselves or information about themselves, and thereby express themselves selectively. The domain of privacy partially overlaps with security, which can include the concepts of a ...

Digital art Digital art refers to any artistic work or practice that uses digital technology as part of the creative or presentation process, or more specifically computational art that uses and engages with digital media. Since the 1960s, various names ...

Internet Governance Internet governance consists of a system of laws, rules, policies and practices that dictate how its board members manage and oversee the affairs of any internet related-regulatory body. This article describes how the Internet was and is currentl ...

Cloud Computing Cloud computing is the on-demand availability of computer system resources, especially data storage ( cloud storage) and computing power, without direct active management by the user. Large clouds often have functions distributed over mul ...

and

Internet censorship Internet censorship is the legal control or suppression of what can be accessed, published, or viewed on the Internet. Censorship is most often applied to specific internet domains (such as Wikipedia.org) but exceptionally may extend to all Inte ...

. The Berkman Klein Center supports events, presentations, and conferences about the Internet and invites scientists to share their ideas.

Digital Media Law Project

The Digital Media Law Project (DMLP) was a project hosted by the Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society at Harvard Law School. It had previously been known as the Citizen Media Law Project. The purposes of the DMLP were: # To provide resources and other assistance, including

legal assistance Legal aid is the provision of assistance to people who are unable to afford legal representation and access to the court system. Legal aid is regarded as central in providing access to justice by ensuring equality before the law, the right to co ...

, to individuals and groups involved in online and citizen media. # To ensure "online journalists, media organizations, and their sources are allowed to examine and debate network security and data protection vulnerabilities without criminal punishment, in order to inform citizens and lawmakers about networked computer security." # To facilitate the participation of citizens in online media. # To protect the freedom of speech on the Internet. In 2014, Berkman Klein Center announced that it would "spin off its most effective initiatives and cease operation as a stand-alone project within the Berkman Klein Center."

Internet and Democracy Project

The Berkman Klein Center operated the now-completed Internet and Democracy Project, which describes itself as an:

StopBadware

In 2006, the center established the non-profit organization StopBadware, aiming to stop viruses, spyware, and other threats to the open Internet, in partnership with the

Oxford Internet Institute The Oxford Internet Institute (OII) is a multi-disciplinary department of social and computer science dedicated to the study of information, communication, and technology, and is part of the Social Sciences Division of the University of Oxford ...

Google Google LLC () is an American multinational technology company focusing on search engine technology, online advertising, cloud computing, computer software, quantum computing, e-commerce, artificial intelligence, and consumer electronics. ...

Lenovo Lenovo Group Limited, often shortened to Lenovo ( , ), is a Chinese Multinational corporation, multinational technology company specializing in designing, manufacturing, and marketing consumer electronics, Personal computer, personal computers, ...

and

Sun Microsystems Sun Microsystems, Inc. (Sun for short) was an American technology company that sold computers, computer components, software, and information technology services and created the Java programming language, the Solaris operating system, ZFS, the ...

. In 2010, StopBadware became an independent entity supported by

PayPal PayPal Holdings, Inc. is an American multinational financial technology company operating an online payments system in the majority of countries that support online money transfers, and serves as an electronic alternative to traditional paper ...

, and

Mozilla Mozilla (stylized as moz://a) is a free software community founded in 1998 by members of Netscape. The Mozilla community uses, develops, spreads and supports Mozilla products, thereby promoting exclusively free software and open standards, wi ...

Digital Public Library of America

The

Digital Public Library of America The Digital Public Library of America (DPLA) is a US project aimed at providing public access to digital holdings in order to create a large-scale public digital library. It officially launched on April 18, 2013, after two and a half years of dev ...

is a project aimed at making a large-scale digital public library accessible to all.

Ethics and Governance of Artificial Intelligence

In 2017, the BKC received a $27M grant with the

MIT Media Lab The MIT Media Lab is a research laboratory at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, growing out of MIT's Architecture Machine Group in the School of Architecture. Its research does not restrict to fixed academic disciplines, but draws from ...

to "advance artificial intelligence research for the public good" and "to ensure automation and machine learning are researched, developed, and deployed in a way which vindicate social values of fairness, human autonomy, and justice."

Members

Fellows include or have included: *

John Perry Barlow John Perry Barlow (October 3, 1947February 7, 2018) was an American poet, essayist, cattle rancher, and cyberlibertarian political activist who had been associated with both the Democratic and Republican parties. He was also a lyricist for the ...

danah boyd danah boyd (stylized in lowercase, born November 24, 1977 as Danah Michele Mattas) She noted her mother added lowercase 'h' in birth name "danah" for typographical balance, reflecting the lowercase first letter 'd' and later changed her last na ...

Amber Case Amber Case (born Portland, Oregon) is an American cyborg anthropologist, user experience designer and public speaker. She studies the interaction between humans and technology. Biography Case was born in about 1986. She graduated with a bachelor ...

John Clippinger John Henry Clippinger III is a researcher, entrepreneur, and activist around decentralized, autonomous, self-organizing systems with a focus on generative governance and finance for climate change and social equity. He is the author of ''A Crowd ...

* Yasodara Cordova *

Primavera de Filippi Primavera De Filippi is a French Legal research, legal scholar, Internet activism, Internet activist and artist, whose work focuses on the blockchain, peer production communities and copyright law. She is permanent researcher at the Centre nation ...

* Tamar Frankel *

Samer Hassan Samer Hassan is a computer scientist, activist and researcher, focused on the use of decentralized technologies to support commons-based collaboration. He is Associate Professor at Universidad Complutense de Madrid (Spain) and Faculty Associate ...

Benjamin Mako Hill Benjamin Mako Hill is a free software activist, hacker, author, and professor. He is a contributor and free software developer as part of the Debian and Ubuntu projects as well as the co-author of three technical manuals on the subject, ''Debia ...

Reynol Junco Reynol ("Rey") Junco is an American psychologist and education and social media researcher. He is known for his pioneering work on using social technologies in higher education. Rey is also known for his statistics, data science, and analytics sk ...

Rebecca MacKinnon Rebecca MacKinnon (born September 16, 1969) is an author, researcher, Internet freedom advocate, and co-founder of the citizen media network Global Voices. She is notable as a former CNN journalist who headed the CNN bureaus in Beijing and late ...

James F. Moore James F. Moore studies co-evolution in social and economic systems. He is best known for pioneering the Business ecosystem approach to studying networks of organizations that together constitute a system of mutual support and that co-evolve contr ...

Mayo Fuster Morell Mayo Fuster Morell (born 1975) is a social researcher. Her research has focused on sharing economy, social movements, online communities and digital Commons, frequently using participatory action research and method triangulation. She has been ...

Bruce Schneier Bruce Schneier (; born January 15, 1963) is an American cryptographer, computer security professional, privacy specialist, and writer. Schneier is a Lecturer in Public Policy at the Harvard Kennedy School and a Fellow at the Berkman Klein Cente ...

Doc Searls David "Doc" Searls (born July 29, 1947), is an American journalist, columnist, and a widely read blogger. He is the host of FLOSS Weekly, a free and open-source software (FLOSS) themed netcast from the TWiT Network, a co-author of ''The Cluetra ...

Wendy Seltzer Wendy Seltzer is an American attorney and a staff member at the World Wide Web Consortium, where she is the chair of the Improving Web Advertising Business Group. She was previously with Princeton's Center for Information Technology Policy. Selt ...

Peter Suber Peter Dain Suber (born November 8, 1951) is a philosopher specializing in the philosophy of law and open access to knowledge. He is a Senior Researcher at the Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society, Director of the Harvard Office for Scholarly ...

Jimmy Wales Jimmy Donal Wales (born August 7, 1966), also known on Wikipedia by the pseudonym Jimbo, is an American-British Internet entrepreneur, webmaster, and former financial trader. He is a co-founder of the online non-profit encyclopedia Wikipedi ...

David Weinberger David Weinberger (born 1950) is an American author, technologist, and speaker. Trained as a philosopher, Weinberger's work focuses on how technology — particularly the internet and machine learning — is changing our ideas, with books about the ...

Dave Winer Dave Winer (born May 2, 1955, in Queens, New York City) is an American software developer, entrepreneur, and writer who resides in New York City. Winer is noted for his contributions to outliners, scripting, content management, and web servic ...

Ethan Zuckerman Ethan Zuckerman (born 1973) is an American media scholar, blogger, and Internet activist. He was the director of the MIT Center for Civic Media, and Associate Professor of the Practice in Media Arts and Sciences at MIT until May 2020, and the aut ...

Mary L. Gray Mary L. Gray is an American anthropologist and author. She is a Fellow at Harvard University's Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society, as well as a Senior Principal Researcher at Microsoft Research. Along with her research, Gray teaches a ...

Faculty include: *

William W. Fisher William "Terry" W. Fisher III is the WilmerHale Professor of Intellectual Property Law at Harvard Law School and faculty director of the Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society. His primary research and teaching areas are intellectual prope ...

The center also has active groups of faculty associates, affiliates and alumni who host and participate in their projects each year.

References

External links

* * {{DEFAULTSORT:Berkman Klein Center For Internet and Society Information technology research institutes Harvard Law School Research institutes in Massachusetts Computer law organizations Information society Internet governance advocacy groups Internet-related activism Research institutes established in 1998 1998 establishments in Massachusetts Harvard University