Welcome to Tech Talk by CT.

So, you know, what we really try to do on a regular basis and before we make every any move, any major decision is we think about how will this impact access, resources, and empowering folks to be able to share, protect, and sometimes monetize their creative works. Our work varies from you know, we really have benefited from a amazing network of intellectual property professors and scholars, and we work with them to be thinking about how, intellectual property policy can be improved upon to empower these communities. And as a result, we are always receiving wonderful white papers and just really thoughtful pieces on just that. We also work and advocate for policy that will, again, address this mission. And then we do a lot of work in the community to ensure that, you know, disenfranchised communities, marginalized communities, understand the power of their intellectual property, and then understand how they can, you know, the steps that they should be taking to be able to control and monetize and really reap the full benefits of of their creative works. Yeah. For people who aren't that familiar with kind of IP law because it is a little bit

I think that so it's interesting. The way that we framed it in a lot of our outreach work, we think of it as creators. Right? Yeah. So that's anyone that can range from Musicians, artists. Musician, artists, innovators, entrepreneurs, small business owners, anything from, you know, from the the availability of creative works on Etsy where you we have had people come in that talk to us about amazing works that they do with leather and whether or not there is a, you know, trade secret in the process, you know, or if there's, you know, just different ways that they can, protect their work. Mhmm. Right? But then also looking at the policies that are impacting their ability to disseminate these works. Right? So, you know, while intellectual property is one of our top tier and, like, number one focus as far as policy goes, we're also looking at, you know, policy that impacts our ability to do these things. Right? So anything from content moderation Oh, interesting. To, yeah, privacy, platform integrity, all of these issues impact, you know, our folks' ability to get their works out there and to be able to fully monetize and freely express themselves.

Yeah. I mean, so I would say they they come in different flavors and different forms. I mean, the neat thing about the outreach that we do is that we do it on a national level, and every, you know, different pocket of creativity comes in a different flavor. So, you know, for example, in California, we were able to work with this amazing body of musicians that were just having a hard time understanding and navigating copyright. But then, also, you know, we work a lot with the implementation of music modernization act Ah, yeah. Ensuring that folks are aware of, you know, what this implementation means. A lot of our independent and emerging artists are really impacted by digital and the ability to stream. So just being able to understand, you know, how important it is for them to be plugged in, how important it is that we are mindful of them as outreach is being done and education is being done to ensure that the unique needs of independent artists are being thought about. So I think that that's one need a piece of flavor. I would say that, you know, in Washington DC, when we do our events, we bring out a lot of entrepreneurs and small business owners. Right? So those are a lot of conversations on trademark, right, where we have I remember one time we had this really interesting, group come in, and, basically, they'd put they'd put it together. They threw a party, a specific party, but it had taken off. It was huge. Right? And what was happening was is that other people were taking the name, right, and throwing the same party. And so they came in and wanted to have a conversation about, listen. Like, can we trademark this? What does that mean? Because these things I mean, these things would come from city to city to city. They were sold out. It was huge. And it's just that ability to really you know, I feel like if you're in a traditional setting, maybe you wouldn't you know, maybe folks wouldn't have seen the value of what this set of guys what they had built. Yeah. But, you know, I feel like in the spaces that we create, which are extremely creative and really diverse, we're able to see the value That's awesome. And the brilliance of these new

Right. Relative. That's I was like, I so, you know, I think some of the things that we're really, really paying attention to, you know, we're really excited about the work you guys are doing on privacy, how that'll impact small businesses, especially as they move, and and as we think about how that'll apply on, in ecommerce and things like that. Mhmm. You know, the copyright modernization, we we're paying close attention to that, and it just how that will specifically impact diverse communities. And then the last piece we're really excited about is the success act, which is really looking at, or ensuring diversity in patents. Right? How interesting. Yeah. I think that and and that, I think, nicely folds into the other piece of work that we're really, really paying attention to is diversity, not only in patents and in copyright, but also diversity in who's actually in these offices and in the IP. I was gonna ask about that. Tell me about the work you're doing there. Well, so some of the things that we do is we host an annual CLE conference where we bring together folks that are really interested in taking a look at the intersection of intellectual property and social justice and have really cultivated an amazing community of lawyers and policy experts. We also host a MOSAIC conference that brings together, professors and academics in the IP space with activists and artists and storytellers, to get again, talk about the issues, and how they uniquely impact, the folks that we're interested in supporting. And, you know, and I have to say, lastly, you know, our founder, professor Latif Mtimah, he has really cultivated the sensational community, at the Howard University Yeah. School of law. And it is, it's really grown in a way. This is it's a beautiful IP community that really care about social justice that then go off to do great and wonderful things. And, but they all come back, and it has really grown. So it's not just HU alum, but it definitely has, like, that core and it's tethered to their mission. It's this beautiful marriage of the mission of HU School of Law and and, our think tank that I just love to watch and see how it grows in the organic,

white paper while she was here. I mean, it's just to say that it does you know, the seeds are planted early on, and they just all do go on to do great things, but you can see how the mission of I IPSJ,

But you'd see how it's weaved into,

K. Hello? Which thing should I be using here? Hello? Oh, there we go. Success. It has connected. Hi. Yeah. So my name is Amber Balde, and I I do run a company that works on, helping people make and run applications that function differently. And what that means is these are applications that have some functionality that is decentralized, censorship resistant, or privacy preserving. Sometimes, yes, that involves a blockchain, not all the time. We can get to that later. I'm also on the board of the Zcash Foundation. Zcash is a cryptocurrency that attempts to be essentially, digital cash. And there are a lot of cryptocurrencies or other payment systems you use that claim that they're digital cash, but really what they're working on is making sure that you have money that you can put in your pocket digitally or under your mattress digitally, and you can spend it without having to ask someone else permission. And so while I have a lot of thoughts about online communication in general, I'm going to attempt to limit the content today to things that specifically talk about this kind of intersection of blockchains and decentralized systems and why people are raising these technologies when they're talking about freedom of speech. And fundamentally, I think it's because they've heard in some of these white papers from some of these consultancies that blockchains are an immutable ledger of something. And because they're replicated across many nodes on a network, they become censorship resistant. Whatever you put on them is censorship resistant. And while this is true, it's not necessarily a silver bullet for for supporting freedom of speech. That said, what you what you do get is a censorship resistant system. And so, we end up in a place where, we have we have an Internet where you would like to sometimes have things that stick around for a long time, like for the example that we had, Wikipedia. We would always like people to have access to Wikipedia. The Internet archive actually does a fantastic job of replicating and mirroring that. You don't need a blockchain for it. But you'd like that to stick around. There are other things we'd like to stick around, like say the records of the Environmental Protection Agency. But then, there are actually some things that we really wish would disappear from the Internet. So things like revenge porn or say all of the collective works of Iggy Azalea, the musician. And the problem is that we fundamentally don't agree on which stuff belongs in which category. And technically, it's impossible to create a system that satisfies both of those things simultaneously. You cannot have a system where everything can stick around forever, but we also can unilaterally remove some things when it serves our purposes. And so these types of systems are not just a silver bullet, for solving freedom of speech. But where might an immutable log be helpful? Well, perhaps, we're supposed to postulate on what this future might look like. Perhaps in the future, we could actually be digitally signing events that we consensually would like to place into the public domain in an ongoing basis. So for example, I could cosign with my university that I received a diploma and that could not be taken away from me no matter where in the world I moved. We can prevent diploma fraud. Yay. That's great. Maybe also, we could say have the event producers here along with me and perhaps whoever in the room would like to participate sign that the video record of this is the canonical event of what happened here today. And then no matter where it was replicated, we would be able to ensure that that was the right video. Why does that matter? Well, when one of my loving adoring fans from four Chan decides to create a deep fakes version of me saying absolutely awful things up here, it would be wonderful to be able to reputiate that kind of sentiment. So is an insurance policy on reality really something that should be part of a discussion on freedom of speech? I'm not sure. But when we can make anybody appear to say anything, does freedom of speech kind of even matter anymore? And that's that sounds really nihilist, and it's a dystopia that's kind of fun to think about as a thought experiment because we're not quite there yet, but we will be. But we have our own different kind of fun dystopias that we actually live in today. Right? The the surveillance capitalism centralized infrastructure dystopia that that we live in here. So let's talk about decentralization. So, if you're not familiar with what people mean when they're talking about infrastructure these days, they mostly mean limiting specific bottlenecks and points of failure, on various networks. Right? And so what that's supposed to mean is that people have more choice. People have more agency. It's a distribution of power, not just a distribution of network topology. But that results in hopefully more freedom of the participants in the network. But the thing is, we used to actually have this kind of decentralization. We're really decentralizing the web these days. Remember when you used to take a floppy disk and you would stick it into your computer and install an application, then you would like tippy type in your document, and then then you would accidentally lose your college thesis and there was no way to recover it? You had your data. You take back your data. But that was actually bad for a number of reasons, not not least of which the resilience of losing your documents. But also it was very hard to collaborate. It was hard to share, and it was also very inefficient. It's not a great storage model as we started to build these clouds, so we moved everything. But in doing so, we also abdicated control of the underlying data of these applications because we didn't want to deal with the management of their infrastructure, and those things were tightly coupled. So hopefully, some of the the work that that I'm doing and that other people in the space are doing is working on decoupling that again, so that we can get normal people to be able to run their own kind of infrastructure without having to become technical geniuses. What does that look like? It means does it mean that we all start running servers in our basement again? Hopefully not. Probably not. Generally bad for security. Do it. Hopefully not. You can if you want, but most people won't. And that's the thing, and that's where a lot of like, cypherpunk ideology has failed over the last twenty years, is we cannot actually convince normal people to do that. So if you want to, have at it. But what we can do is segment existing public clouds and let people run their own kind of tiny little virtual private clouds, where you have domain over you have control over your own domain. And then you can connect from what you're running there to what's running in other people's little clouds, and you can start to create these sorts of decentralized sorts of social networks, which are awful from a content moderation standpoint, by the way. Censorship resistant communication for sure, absolutely absolutely awful administration controls for content moderation. But what you can do is you can also start go go back to your document. Right? You can create your own document just like you were using Microsoft Word locally on your laptop. And you feel like you do that with Google Docs today. I mean, it says private with you. You haven't shared it with anybody. Right? But there are a number of instances of journalists working on private drafts and having them simply removed from their g drive while they're in progress of writing them. So what do we have to do so that we get the benefits of this kind of collaborative efficient sharing without having to go become these like digital hermits in a cave in order to also have our own private thoughts? We should be able to bring these two things together. And then we start we need to bring into that the financial applications. So the ability to create marketplaces and have e commerce and everything. And what that means is that we need to have a point of sale system that replicates the experience we've had for thirty, fifty years, where you can walk in and someone says cash or credit. Right now, we're moving, as a society towards cashless payments. That means that every payment is a request to someone else to approve your your ability to make that payment. You might feel like because it's coming from your bank account over a debit transaction that that was cash you had, but it's not actually. It's still a request to someone else. So having a digital equivalent of cash and when you say cash or credit, yeah, it's a euphemism for something like a publicly accessible cryptocurrency, and different ones of them have different privacy properties. Sure. But what we need is to maintain the individual dignity of the ability to make private payments. What what does that mean? Well, our first amendment does guarantee us the right to freedom of association, the ability to be, to not have chilling effects when we donate to a nonprofit that perhaps we wouldn't want our name associated within the public record. Or going forward, I would maybe like to buy a candy bar without my health insurer hearing about it. When we have a completely cashless system that's simply based on our existing credit payment rails, you cannot prevent your insurer from hearing about every purchase that you make. And so we end up in this this final situation where we we, need to focus on taking back the rights, the agency that we have over our communication systems. And when we are given a choice in this tug of war between privacy and between security and enforcement, we should always kind of tug towards this privacy side because we can get creative with enforcement. We can get creative with moderation. But when we give up our unassailable kind of cryptographic privacy, there is simply no way to claw that back. And then what we end up with is a surveillance state powered by surveillance capitalism and where we have given up that freedom in the name of this kind of ephemeral security. Thank you.

Good afternoon, everyone. Is this on? Good. I just first wanna start with thanking CDT for having me here today. I really appreciate the opportunity to, talk about, I think, this, really important issue and I think emerging issue particularly for, vulnerable and marginalized communities online in the digital space. So whether we are describing the hashtag campaigns that grew the movement for black lives, that added momentum to dreamers, or that spurred on the Arab Spring, or take, for example, the use of smartphone cameras and live streaming to document the realities of oppressive experiences for communities of color, or the narrative changing storytelling of YouTube creators from all backgrounds, Internet platforms have birthed, expanded, and made social change not only possible but global in their implications. At the Muslim Public Affairs Council, we work on public perceptions and policies that impact relate to American Muslim communities. Our work now is increasingly focusing on the digital space as we deal with the next frontier of issues that are impacting our communities online. Online safety and digital environments have numerous challenges and nuances and we work regularly with our constituencies and other underserved communities to ensure we're in the process of finding a balance between safety and expression. The Internet has opened up unprecedented opportunities for diverse communities to speak, create, educate, and even entertain by building a direct connection with their audience. When mainstream media outlets fail to serve diverse communities with relatable content or resolve lingering issues of underrepresentation or misrepresentation, marginalized communities have sought out digital platforms and online services to tell their stories. In some cases, this has led to larger networks recognizing and providing space for previously overlooked talent. Take, for example, Issa Rae or Hasan Minhaj, who organically grew their audiences in their online communities on YouTube and created such a critical mass of followers that they were able to show major networks that their content is sellable in major mainstream markets. In other cases, it has given a platform to voices that would otherwise be silenced, as we heard previously. It's important to note that the same freedom that has allowed us to share our too often unheard and unseen content has also provided a space for voices that promote hate and marginalization, which impact the ability of our communities to flourish. At EMPAC, we believe that outlining the boundaries of the digital public sphere is a matter of serious deliberation. We must address the ways in which hate speech, misinformation, and disinformation have multiplied, oftentimes to the detriment of vulnerable communities. The hate that we see online is only a reflection of the hate that our communities face globally. So depleting oxygen from these toxic digital spaces can diminish the audience that these extremists so clearly seek out. And at the same time, we must aggressively protect against any censorship, be it promoted by government or by the private sector that would limit or inhibit the ability of our communities and communities of color to speak, create, and to be fairly compensated for their work. From creating and building authentic narratives online to ensuring that communities remain engaged in the political and civic process, the Internet can also create an environment of hyperpartisanship and information overload. Activities online from groups seeking to marginalize communities make it harder to vote, leading to continuum of reasons for why our communities are underrepresented at the polls and in politics. At best, technology can spur civic engagement by exposing information that traditional platforms cannot or will not. And at worst, technology can promote conspiracy theories and inaccurate information or even make our election systems vulnerable. Pew Research Pew Research Center, in partnership with Elon University's Imagining the Internet Center, conducted a large scale canvassing of tech experts, government officials, corporate leaders, and scholars, and they asked this question. In the next decade, will public discourse online become more or less shaped by bad actors, harassment, trolls, and an overall tone of griping distrust and disgust. Nearly 40% of the respondents expected that the future of the online public sphere will be shaped by more negative activities. That's a very, I think disturbing trend, I think, that we're going in. So I believe that in order to counter that future filled with more negative activities, we need to form a cultural strategy based on the idea that narrative builds power for people. And we can leverage that power over those who set the incentives, the rules, and the norms that shape society online. We can collectively overcome the trolls and those bad actors through the power of narratives. I'm not saying that we are seeking to completely, eradicate hate and divisiveness. That's, I don't think, a complete possibility. But I am pushing for us to think creatively, using those diverse voices online to build a digital society that does not incentivize hate. We can't talk about shaping the future of speech online for a diversity of speakers without ensuring the inclusion of all of those communities in these conversations. So to understand the challenges and the opportunities for diverse voices, we must include those voices in real life as we're creating those policies. And at the same time, to, at the same time, building digital equity will not be a top down approach. It has to be a whole of society approach, and that approach must include tech companies being transparent on things like how often and why they choose to enforce the policies that they do. Ultimately, I am an optimist at heart, so I think we have a chance to do digitally what we have failed to do in real life. We can shape equity in the digital space. MPAC and I know that there are other organizations, we all stand ready to make a difference. And if online platforms believe in encouraging safe environments, a collaboration between diverse private, public, and advocacy entities must ensue. Thank you.