W E N D Y
.seltzer.org

I am at American University's Washington College of Law, as a visiting Practitioner in Residence in the Glushko-Samuelson Intellectual Property Law Clinic and teaching Information Privacy and Intellectual Property. I am a fellow with the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard Law School. I was a Visiting Fellow with the Oxford Internet Institute, teaching a joint course with the Said Business School, Media Strategies for a Networked World. I have previously taught at Brooklyn Law School, and Northeastern University School of Law, and served as staff attorney with the Electronic Frontier Foundation. Before joining EFF, I taught Internet Law as an adjunct professor at St. John's University School of Law, and practiced intellectual property and technology litigation at Kramer Levin in New York.

Chilling Effects: I founded and developed the Chilling Effects Clearinghouse, a project to study and combat the ungrounded legal threats that chill activity on the Internet. In conjunction with the EFF and law school clinics across the country, we invite recipients and senders of cease and desist notices to submit these notices for analysis in issue-spotting FAQ-style memos and inclusion in our database. Chilling Effects offers resources for Internet users who face legal threats, and, through its collection of data, we hope to analyze the out-of-court effects of those threats to chill legitimate activity, or, conversely, the extent to which unlawful activity on the Net proves resistant to legal action. Chilling Effects has been featured in the New York Times and Boston Globe, as well as in several court filings.

I serve on the Board of Directors of The Tor Project, supporting privacy and anonymity research, education, and technology. I'm the at-large advisory committee liaison to the ICANN Board.

I helped public interest ISP Online Policy Group to win the first case for damages under DMCA Section 512(f) for abusive copyright claims (OPG v. Diebold), and defended the privacy of Internet users as amicus in Verizon v. RIAA and Charter v. RIAA. As amicus in Lexmark v. Static Control, we helped to preserve interoperability, against the threat of overreaching DMCA claims. I led EFF's Digital Television Liberation Front and the Endangered Gizmos campaign.

My work at the Berkman Center focuses on the legal issues and intellectual property questions surrounding Free Software. I helped to start and now lead the Openlaw project, an experiment bringing the methods of open source and Free Software development to legal argument in the public interest. Openlaw's first case, Eldred v. Ashcroft was argued before the Supreme Court October 9, 2002. The Openlaw DVD forum has developed arguments in defense of 2600 Magazine's posting of DeCSS code, arguing that technological protections for digital media must accommodate free speech and fair use. Openlaw participants filed an amicus brief in the Southern District of New York in the DeCSS case Universal v. Reimerdes, and I drafted the cryptographers' amicus brief to the Second Circuit on appeal. Finally, I have been working with the Creative Commons project to offer the public a range of open licenses to promote sharing of creative non-software works.

Publications

Invited Presentations:

I continue to work with the Berkman Center to develop an open-source courseware package for classroom use and for its distance lecture and discussion series. Read about the Bot, or see courseware version 1.0 in action in the 1998 Internet & Society Class. From time to time, I also update the annotation engine, a proxy that predates (and outlasted) ThirdVoice in allowing people to post and view notes on remote web pages.

While at Harvard, I led the Berkman Center's Representation in Cyberspace Study in conjunction with the ICANN Membership Advisory Committee, and helped to webcast three of ICANN's international public meetings. I also led the Center's cybercourse on Privacy in Cyberspace, with Prof. Arthur Miller and was a teaching fellow for Law of Cyberspace at UMass Amherst.

Current Features:

Weblog

Code

Law

Code Is Law

Google

 
Last updated August, 2005
(cc) Wendy Seltzer (public key)