Students attending Innovate/Activate are invited to attend a pre-conference lunch organized by boalt.org and Students for Free Culture. This is a great opportunity to meet likeminded students and get inspired for I/A 2.0.

The lunch will take place in Boalt Hall’s Goldberg Room at noon on Friday, April 20. If you’d like to attend, please email anaenriquez [at] berkeley [dot] edu for more information.

We’ll be running a workshop on April 21, from 12-1pm, that will create a campaign live for one organization at the conference. The workshop will be led by Laure Parsons (x+x connect), Ben Moskowitz (Mozilla Foundation), Erica Priggen (Free Range Studios), and Colin Mutchler (LoudSauce). If you’d like to submit a proposal to have your organization selected for this, send an email to laure [at] xplusxconnect [dot] com. Please include your name and the name of your organization, relevant URL, the message/issue you want to share, and the current status of the campaign.

Alexis Ohanian, co-founder of the social news website reddit and vocal opponent of the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA), will provide the opening keynote address at Innovate / Activate 2.0, an international conference connecting activism and intellectual property, set to take place at UC Berkeley on April 20-21, 2012.

As “one of the more passionate and audacious young entrepreneurs in tech,” Alexis has helped lead the charge to keep the Internet open in face of overreaching IP legislation introduced in the U.S. Congress over the past year.

In addition to his role with reddit, Alexis founded Breadpig, an uncorporation that creates and sells geeky things and contributes their profits to good causes. He also helped launch the travel search company hipmunk, serves as the Ambassador to the East for Y Combinator, and is an angel investor at Das Kapital Capital.

Register here to join us and Alexis at I/A 2.0. And don’t forget to follow us on twitter @innact for updates. See you at Berkeley!

Happy New Year! It’s already been an exciting start to 2012 with the battle over SOPA/PIPA and a perfect time to gear up for Innovate/Activate 2.0, our conference on IP and activism, to be held at UC Berkeley from Friday, April 20-Saturday, April 21. This year, we’ve decided on the themes of “How To” and “DIY Activism” — focusing on concrete ways to get more people involved in IP issues and sharing strategies, tactics, lessons learned, etc. from our current and past campaigns and actions.

We have five big announcements to share with you:

1) Conference Registration is now open

You can register for I/A 2.0 here.

Note that for capacity and planning purposes (especially for food), we are asking everyone to pay something for registration. However, in order to be sensitive to people’s financial situations, we are allowing you to pick your own registration fee, ranging from $5-$100 with some suggestions for student, non-profit/academic, and corporate
participants. However, no one will be turned away for lack of funds. If even $5 is too much, email us at info@innovateactivate.org, and we can discuss scholarships/waivers with you.

2) We are now accepting Session Proposals

If you would like to suggest a session for I/A 2.0, you can do it here.

In line with our conference theme, we are looking for three types of suggestions:

a) Ideas or projects that you would like to share/showcase/workshop;
b) Ideas or projects that you would like to hack/collaborate on with others; and
c) Ideas or projects that you would like to see someone else present on.

Please submit as many different ideas/projects as you’d like. We want to get a broad sense of the possibilities and see where the cutting-edge efforts are concentrated. In particular, we are interested in efforts in the education space, grassroots organizing, meme-making and publicity, making and breaking technologies for activist purposes, empirical research and evidence gathering, and legal/policy interventions. But don’t let this limit you; we’re open to all types of sessions!

3) Logistics

We’ve put up a page regarding conference logistics, including information on air travel, hotels, the conference site, etc. Check it out here.

4) Intellectual Sponsors

Beyond Berkeley Law and NYLS, a number of significant organizations who take action on IP issues have agreed to sponsor the conference. These include the American Assembly, Cambia, the Center for Democracy and Technology, the Center for Information Technology Policy at Princeton, the Center for Social Media and the Program on Information Justice and Intellectual Property at American U., the Electronic Frontier Foundation, Mozilla, NKU’s Chase Law & Informatics Institute, the Open Video Conference, Peer 2 Peer University, Public Knowledge, Students for Free Culture, and Yale’s Information Society Project. Representatives from all of these amazing organizations will be at the conference and helping us make it a major focal point for IP Activism in 2012. To learn more about our sponsors, see our sponsorship page.

5) Looking for Keynote Speakers

We’ve contacted a few people about possibly keynoting I/A, but we’re always looking for more ideas for great speakers. If you have suggestions, please send them to us at:

keynote@innovateactivate.org.

Thanks again for all your support. Now go register and submit ideas!

Save the date! New York Law School’s Institute for Information Law & Policy and Berkeley Law’s Samuelson Law, Technology & Public Policy Clinic are pleased to present Innovate / Activate 2.0. The event will take place April 20-21, 2012 at Sutardja Dai Hall on the campus of beautiful UC Berkeley. The conference will run from 2-6 p.m. on Friday, April 20, and from 10-4 p.m. on Saturday, April 21.

About the event: Intellectual property regimes seek to benefit society through a variety of incentives, from improving access to encouraging innovation to preserving public knowledge. However, evidence has been building to suggest that there are substantial flaws in the design and implementation of various IP regimes, leading to failures in policy and harms to the public. As a result, active communities have formed to address these shortcomings and the important issues they raise, such as the tension between free speech and efforts to expand copyright’s scope and enforcement tools; the importance of fair use and follow-on creativity; the role of alternative licensing systems such as Creative Commons or the GNU Public License; the appropriateness of patent protection for software and business methods; and the conflict between overpatenting of pharmaceuticals and broad access to medicines and diagnostic technologies. But there’s much more that can be done.

Innovate / Activate is about sharing, discussing, and reexamining our approaches to improving global welfare through identifying new and existing IP-related activism efforts, developing strategies for overcoming IP obstacles, and delivering practical solutions to spur change.

More details to follow. In the meantime, follow us on twitter @innact and check out the Past Events page to learn more about last year’s event and how you can get involved. We look forward to seeing you at Berkeley this Spring!

On September 24-25, 2010, the New York Law School Institute for Information Law & Policy and the Yale Law School Information Society Project convened the Innovate / Activate Unconference on Intellectual Property and Activism, an event made possible by the generous support of Google. Innovate / Activate brought together over 100 students, academics, activists, and professionals from all across the IP and activism spectrum to examine the ways in which we can improve global welfare through the thoughtful consideration of IP.

Innovate / Activate 1.0 was host to nearly 50 presentations covering an enormously wide spectrum of topics. More information about Innovate / Activate 1.0 can be found on the Past Events page. Video of all of the presentations can be found here.