MIT 6.805/STS085: Ethics and Law on the Electronic Frontier
in coordination with
Harvard Law School: Internet and Society
Fall Semester, 1999
6.805/STS085 Midterm Paper
Midterm papers are due on Tuesday, October 19.
Papers should be 5000-7500 words long.
Proposal
On Tuesday, October 5, you should turn in a two-page
description of your proposed topic, the general points you plan to
cover, and source material and other references that you plan to use.
Send proposals by email to all three of us: Hal, Mike, and Danny.
Please send ASCII text only, no attachments. We will reply as quickly
as possible to your proposal to give you feedback, suggestions on how
to refine your topic, and places to look for references.
Your midterm paper should have a thesis, i.e., an idea, claim, or
argument that you are putting forward and defending in the paper. In
general, a good paper will start out by stating the thesis and proceed
to support it in a focused and coherent way. If you are unclear on
what we mean by this, have a look at note from the RPI Writing Center,
Thesis Development in Analytical Writing.
In your proposal, you should state as explicitly as possible what the
thesis of the midterm paper will be. Of course, you can't do that
completely until you've done the research and developed your
arguments, but try now to at least say what point the paper will be
trying to make.
Writing the midterm paper
We require good quality writing. Papers with spelling, grammatical,
or stylistic errors will be returned for rewriting, with a
penalized grade. Good resources on writing are The
Mayfield Handbook of Technical and Scientific Writing, by Les
Perelman, Ed Barrett, and Jim Paradis (available on the Web at MIT
only), and
Grammar and
Style Notes by Jack Lynch.
Get some people to read and comment on your paper before you turn it
in. It may also be valuable to check over your paper with someone in
the Writing Center.
Turning the paper in
Turn in your finished paper on-line. Send copies by email to
all three of us (Hal, Mike, and Danny). Format your
paper either as plain ASCII text or as HTML. Do not send LaTex
source, Word .doc files, .sdw files, or postscript, .pdf, or other formatted
stuff. If you use HTML, make your paper a single document,
not a collection of links, except possibly in the bibliography.
Actually email us the paper -- don't just put it up on a web
page and tell us the URL.
Be careful in proofreading. It can be very difficult to spot errors in
on-line writing.
Approach and Scope of Paper
The papers for this course will be difficult to write, because the
material is so current. We are of course interested in your opinions
and ideas, but you should treat this paper as research and analysis,
not just venting or making unsubstantiated assertions.
On the other
hand, we do expect you to have opinions and a point
of view on your topic -- not to just write a book report or a summary
of what other people have said.
Be sure to back up your arguments with facts and by citing source
material, including Court ruling if this is relevant to your topic.
There is a tremendous amount of reference material available on-line
in the course archives and other places on the net. Searching for law
review articles with Lexis-Nexis can be extremely valuable way to find
material.
If you cite unpublished on-line material, you can include
citations or links to the appropriate URLs in the bibliography.
Topic
The topic should be in one of the areas we've covered in the first
four weeks of the course: the Internet and the First Amendment,
internet politics, cryptography, or controversial content and
filtering and labeling.
Here are some suggested topics. Remember that these are only
suggestions. Don't feel constrained to do something in this list.
You might also look through the
exemplary papers from previous classes. Feel free, by the way, to
use these papers as references. By the same token, don't do something
that just rehashes papers from previous semesters.
- In December, Larry Lessig will publish a new book,
Code: And Other Laws of Cyberspace, which extends the
perspective of the "Law of the Horse" paper. Write a critical review
of this forthcoming book. Hal can provide a draft manuscript to
anyone who wants to do this project.
- There have been several articles in the wake of Zeran
v. AOL that try to come to grips with alternative approaches to
liability for ISPs and other internet publishers. Write a critical
review of a few of these papers, and evaluate their suggestions.
- The appeal of the Bernstein
case will be reheard. Imagine that you are one of the judges
rehearing the appeal. On what points do you agree and disagree with
conclusions of the first appeals panel? In researching this topic, look at
the legal documents, which
which you can find on the EFF's
web site
for the case.
- On September 16, 1999, Vice President Gore, announced
two changes in the Administration's encryption policy. The first is a
change to the export regulations for cryptographic hardware and
software (although the detailed regulations will not be announced
until December). The second is a new bill, "The Cyberspace Electronic
Security Act of 1999", which the Administration would like Congress to
act upon. Present an analysis of one of these initiatives, possibly
together with the reaction from the various law enforcement, industry,
and public-interest comunities. This will be a difficult topic, since
the situation will be evolving in real time, as you are writing the
paper. See, for example,
Decoding
the Crypto Policy Change, and also check the articles in the New
York Times and the Washington Post.
Keep in mind that the area of export control regulations is extremely technical
and complex. If you want write about the export control changes, you
may want to get in touch with experts in this area to give you some
guidance: you can contact Hal for pointers on this.
- Is software Constitutionally protected "speech"? The rulings
in Bernstein v. US and Junger v. Daly are apparently
at odds here. After Peter Junger lost, he created the softspeech
discussion list as a forum for debating this point. Review
the arguments there and give your own analysis. You can
find information about the two cases at the EFF web site.
The softspeech list and more information on Junger v. Daly are
at
http://samsara.law.cwru.edu/~sftspch/.
- Now that the crypto debate is finally(?) working to a
conclusion, is the US about to begin a similar controvery, pitting
First Amendment rights against national security needs, over the issue
of shutter control? Shutter control is the set of
regulations (existing and proposed) to control the dissemination of
images from high-resolution satellites. For a start, see the info on
the
PBS news special, broadcast on September 30. See also the article
God's Eyes
for Sale, in the March/April 1999 issue of Technology
Review. But there's a lot more digging you'll need to do,
especially when it comes to the legal issues, which are completely
open territoty.
- Are digital signatures legally binding? Should they be? What
are the issues here? Note that there has been extensive writing on
this topic. Some examples are the American Bar Association's
Digital
Signature Guidelines and the
paper by David Fillingham written for this course in 1997. There
should also be lots of papers in law journals, which you can find
through Lexis.
- Looking back four years, what do you think of PICS? Does it
fulfil its goal of access control without censorship, or does it create the
infratructure that will inevitably lead to censorship? If you had to
design PICS again, are there things you would do differently? For
references, see Larry Lessig's new book (cited above), the W3C PICS
site, and lots of other stuff, pro and con, that you can find on the
Web.
Return to Course home page
Hal Abelson (hal@mit.edu)
Mike Fischer (mfischer@mit.edu)
Danny Weitzner (djweitzner@w3.org)
Jonathan Zittrain (zittrain@law.harvard.edu)
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Last modified: October 2 1999, 11:30 PM