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The “Internet Giants” Invade Coursera

By Rob Mitchum // June 30, 2015

Since the first personal computer was developed 40 years ago, computational technology has dramatically changed human society. Unsurprisingly, this massive impact is also reflected in laws around the world, which struggle to keep pace with the mercurial advances of computers, smartphones, the internet, ebooks, and more. From the antitrust cases against Microsoft to arguments over file-sharing and streaming, technology law has produced some of the highest profile legal disputes of recent decades.

These are important issues worth serious consideration and starting on Monday, July 13, Randy Picker, professor at the University of Chicago Law School and Computation Institute Senior Fellow, will address these issues via his new Coursera course, “Internet Giants: The Law and Economics of Media Platforms.” The seven-week course will be available “on demand,” meaning it will be available for Coursera users to start at any time and allowing them to skip around to topics of highest interest.

Picker describes the course material as a “video textbook,” made up of 20 hours of video lectures filmed by the UChicago Academic & Scholarly Technology Services team behind previous UChicago Coursera courses on climate change and neurobiology. To prepare for his time in front of the camera, Picker took a filmmaking class at Second City and adjusted his course material for the studio rather than the lecture hall. Rather than recreate one of his “offline” classes, Picker decided to combine material from three different courses he teaches at UChicago, covering a broad timeline of developments in technology law.

“The stuff we’re going to talk about are the technologies people use in their everyday lives,” Picker said. “There’s a set of organizing legal and economic principles to talk about across these areas.”

The first two weeks will examine how governments in the U.S. and Europe have dealt with the rapid rise of Microsoft and Google, and the implications for software development and internet privacy. Subsequent weeks will cover smartphones and their influence on American spectrum policy and patent law, and the importance of net neutrality — tracing its roots back to the origins of the United States Post Office. The final three weeks will cover how the internet and technology have disrupted media industries, from Napster to Netflix to Kindles.

“I think this is great material and really important issues that are being shaped across the world,” Picker said. “At a minimum, at the end of the course, I want people to talk, think, and engage on all of these issues more intelligently than they did at the beginning of the course.”

And for the first time in a UChicago MOOC—massive, open online course—the class will also offer a separate layer for University of Chicago alums. The hope here is to try to recreate online the intellectual excitement of being in residence at the University. For more information on the alumni layer for Internet Giants, click here.