MIT COURSE 6.805 IS NOW 6.4590
This information is for the Fall 2022 Class.
August 26: The class is currently full. Students who have not already pre-registered will be placed on a waiting list.
Class Meetings: Thursdays, 1:00 p.m. – 4:00 p.m., room 37-212
Pre-Semester Assignment
There is an assignment due on September 7 at 11:59 pm Eastern time, which is the day before the first class. You must turn in this assignment in order to finalize your admittance to the course.
You can find the assignment and submission instructions here.
Course Description
In this class, we will consider the interaction between law, policy, and technology as they relate to the evolving controversies over control of the Internet. Our goal is for participants to develop the technical, legal, and rhetorical skills to analyze and participate in the evolution of the global public policy environments that govern human behavior on the Internet.
Topics include: history of Internet policy, the relationship between technical architecture and law, privacy, cybersecurity, freedom of expression, intellectual property, electronic surveillance, trade policy, and international affairs.
Examples will be drawn primarily from U.S. law but take an explicitly global perspective on policy, politics, and online activism. Students will interact with leading public-policy experts in classroom settings and through remote participation. There is an extensive final project that will be done under the guidance of mentors who are national leaders in Internet information policy issues.
Check out exemplary student papers from previous years in the 6.4590 archives.
Course Credit
6.4590 counts as a Course 6 Independent Inquiry (II) subject and also as a communications intensive (CI-M) subject.
MIT Course 6 students may count 6.4590 as one of the general engineering concentration subjects required for the S.B. or M.Eng. programs, or use this subject for HASS elective credit (but not both). Students wishing for engineering concentration credit should enroll under the subject number 6.4590, and students wishing HASS credit should enroll under the number STS085. Graduate credit can be granted via STS487 (not Course 6), although this will require making special arrangements with Prof. Fischer for extra work.
6.4590 can be a pathway to performing research with the MIT Internet Policy Research Initiative.
A near-invisible niche for the vast majority of its existence, computer culture has only recently stepped into the big leagues and has yet to even learn the rules. Sprung from a world of digital absolutes, nerd brains are woefully unprepared for the fuzzy gray shadings inherent in the legal system. But if they can’t play the game, they might as well just forfeit to save themselves the beatings.
Greg Knauss (Suck Magazine, Sep. 8, 2000)
The law is the instrument through which a technological revolution [the Internet] is undone. And since we have barely understood how technologists built this revolution, we don’t even see when the lawyers take it away.
Larry Lessig (The Future of Ideas, 2001)