Google Pledges $2M to Stanford Law’s Internet Society

Google Inc. pledged $2 million to fund the Center for Internet and Society (CIS) at Stanford University’s law school. Officials said the collaboration seeks to establish a balance between the right to access and use information, and the ownership of information.

Stanford law professor Lawrence Lessig, the director of the Center for Internet and Society, said the funding will be “be critical to achieving a healthy balance between copyright protection and creative license. We will use this support to build a network of legal resources to achieve in practice the balance that copyright law and the First Amendment intend.”

The Center was founded in 2000 to study the interaction of new technologies and public policy. Its most recent initiative has been the Fair Use Project, which seeks to defend “fair use” rights in a digital environment through declaratory judgment actions...

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Georgia Tech Lands Deal to Develop Cell Chip Tech

Sony Corp., IBM Corp., and Toshiba Corp. agreed to fund a research center at the Georgia Institute of Technology to explore ways to expand the reach of the Cell microprocessor, which they claim can handle some applications 10 times as fast as traditional microprocessors. The processor, which the companies developed in Austin at a cost of $400 million, made its debut several weeks ago in Sony’s new PlayStation 3 video game console.

The companies are giving researchers at Georgia Tech’s STI Center a starter fund of $320,000 to explore ways to adapt the technology for other industries, including biotech, finance, and digital media creation. The Center will also teach students and outside companies how to program computers and write software for the new chip.

The companies said the Cell chip is not expected to make a big dent in the traditional semiconductor market controlled by Intel Corp. and Advanced Micro Devices Inc. anytime soon. But they said it holds great promise for graphics-intensive programs such as video games, broadband Internet video processing, and other digital media applications...

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