I am Principal Identity Architect at Tucows.
Previously, Strategy Lead and Counsel to the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C); previously a Fellow with Yale Law School's Information
Society Project, Princeton University's Center for Information Technology
Policy; the Silicon Flatirons Center for
Law, Technology, and Entrepreneurship at the University of Colorado; and
with the Berkman Klein 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 American University's Washington College of Law, 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 Lumen Database (formerly, 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 many academic papers and court filings.
I have served on the Board of Directors of The Tor Project, supporting
privacy and anonymity research, education, and technology; the
World Wide Web Foundation; and the Open Source Hardware Association. I served on the ICANN Board as at-large advisory
committee liaison.
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.
Early work at the Berkman Center focused on the legal issues and
intellectual property questions surrounding Free Software. I started and led
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
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. I worked
with the Creative Commons project to offer the public a
range of open licenses to promote sharing of creative non-software works.
- Software Patent and/or Software Development, Brooklyn Law Review (2013); cited in Intellectual Ventures v. Symantec, Mayer concurrence, 838 F.3d 1307 (Fed. Cir. 2016).
- Infrastructures of Censorship and Lessons from Copyright Resistance, USENIX FOCI Workshop, August 8, 2011 (local copy)
- Exposing
the Flaws of Censorship by Domain Name, IEEE Security and Privacy,
vol. 9, no. 1, pp. 83-87, Jan./Feb. 2011, doi:10.1109/MSP.2011.8 (local draft)
- Free
Speech Unmoored in Copyright's Safe Harbor: Chilling Effects of the
DMCA on the First Amendment 24 Harvard Journal of
Law and Technology 171 (2010) (local PDF).
- The
Imperfect is the Enemy of the Good: Anticircumvention Versus Open User
Innovation, 25 Berkeley Technology Law Journal 909
(2010) (local
PDF).
- The
Politics of Internet Control and Delegated Censorship, American
Society for International Law (2008) (local PDF).
- The Broadcast Flag: It's not just TV, 57 FCLJ 209 (2005)
- "Why Open Source Needs Copyright Politics," in Open Sources 2.0, (O'Reilly,
2005)
- Death by
DMCA, with Fred von Lohmann, IEEE Spectrum, June 2006
- "The Overloaded Activist," in She's
Such a Geek, Seal Press, 2006
- Crafting Law, CRAFT 06, Jan. 2008
- Artistic
License, CRAFT 07, April 2008
Author page on SSRN
Projects and Explorations
- Lumen Database (formerly Chilling Effects): This pioneering transparency reporting site documents requests to remove online speech and informs Internet users of their rights in response.
- Cross-Cultural Partnership Template: The partnership template and supporting materials are designed to help collaborators with different backgrounds and interests to converse about their common goals and frame joint work.
- Endangered Gizmos: Demonstrating the threat that expansive copyright poses to innovation and creative expression by showcasing some of the devices killed by law. The project included a "build-in" and cookbook to construct MythTV high-definition time-shifting video recorders, one of the endangered gizmos.
- Openlaw: An experiment in crafting legal argument in an open forum, developing arguments, drafting pleadings, and editing briefs in public, online. Non-lawyers and lawyers alike were invited to join the process by adding thoughts to the "brainstorm" outlines, drafting and commenting on drafts in progress, and suggesting reference sources.
- ICANN: From early study of "representation in cyberspace" to service on the Board of the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, helping to shape this multi-stakeholder institution of domain name governance.
- Tor Project: Advocate and founding Board member for the Tor onion-routing secure anonymous communication software.
Teaching
Elsewhere Online
Governing Identity, Respectfully, USENIX PEPR '24, Santa Clara, CA, June 4, 2024
Anonymization & Deidentified Data - What Does the Future Hold (panel), California Lawyers Association Annual Privacy Summit, February 9, 2024
Keynote, Privacy Engineering Section Forum, IAPP Privacy, Security, Risk, Las Vegas, NV, September 23, 2019
Archiving the Future: Law, Technology, and Practice at the Web's Edge, keynote IIPC General Assembly and Web Archiving Conference, Wellington, NZ, November 15, 2018
Transparency of Notice and Choice, Fordham Law School IPLJ Symposium, September 4, 2018
The Right to Unmake and Fair Use in the Age of Instagram, U. Maine Digital Humanities Week, Oct. 2-5, 2017
Keynote, The Anonymity Primitive, Bytes and Rights, WWW Conference, April 4, 2017
Securing the Open Web Platform, OSCON, Austin, TX, May 2016
Freedom to Innovate and the Freedom to Fail, Freedom to Innovate, MIT, October 2015
The Opposite of Censorship, keynote, Princeton Censorship Conference, October 2015
Make Install Freedom, Boston University CS Convocation, May 2013
Solutions to the Software Patent Problem, Santa Clara Law, November 16, 2012
"Privacy, Option Value, Feedback," Privacy Law Scholars
Conference, June 7-8, 2012
Rights and Bytes, ID^3, May 31, 2012
Freedom to Connect,
May 22, 2012
Keynote, "Defending the Open Net," ORGcon, London, March 24, 2012
Global Censorship Conference, Yale, April 31, 2012
"Openness in the Smartphone Ecosystem," Whittier Law Review
Symposium, Nov 4, 2011
"Android's Openness" (keynote) and "Leveraging Openness", Android Open (O'Reilly), San Francisco, Nov. 2011
"Software Patent and/or Software Development," TPRC, Wash. DC,
Oct. 2011; Yale ISP, Oct. 2011
USENIX Workshop on Free and Open Communication on the Internet,
San Francisco, August 2011
Workshop on Free and Open Communication on the Internet, Georgia Tech,
Feb. 24-25, 2011
"Journalism and Social Network Privacy," Privacy and the Press,
University of Colorado, Dec. 3, 2010
"Free Speech Unmoored in Copyright's Safe Harbor," TPRC Conference, Wash. DC, Oct 3, 2010
Keynote, "Making Privacy Visible," Privacy Enhancing Technologies
Symposium, Berlin, Germany July 21, 2010
Online
Censorship -- Content Filtering At Home and Abroad, MAPping Change, Media Access Project, Washington, DC, June 11, 2010
Generation Copyright, ALAI Canada
Colloquium, Montreal, CA, June 1, 2010
Internet Intermediary Liability, Consilience '10, National Law School
of India University, Bangalore, India, May 29-30, 2010
Patents
and Free and Open Source Software, Silicon Flatirons, CU-Boulder,
April 29, 2010
"Free Speech Unmoored in Copyright's Safe Harbors," CU-Boulder
Colloquium, April 2, 2010
"Can You Copyright a
Tweet?" South by Southwest
Interactive, Austin TX, March 14, 2010
"Chokepoints and Chilling Effects, Intermediaries and Online
Speech," Harvard Journal of Law and Technology, Nov. 30, 2009
Cyber Civil Rights: New Challenges for Civil Rights and Civil
Liberties in our Networked Age, commentator, Denver
University Law Review, Nov. 20, 2009
"Chokepoints and Chilling Effects, Intermediaries and Online
Speech," Whittier Law School, Nov. 11, 2009
Politics 101: The Making of Copyright, Cornell Institute for
Computing Law and Policy, Ithaca, NY, July 22, 2009
Copyright,
Technological Protection, and User Innovation, OII Summer Doctoral
Program, Brisbane, Australia, July 7, 2009
Copyright and
Technology, SouthEast LinuxFest, Clemson, SC, June 13, 2009
Intermediated
User Innovation, MIT Open & User Innnovation Workshop, May 19,
2009
Free Speech and
Chilling Effects on the Global Internet, PIR Advisory Council,
April 18, 2009
Authorship, Appropriation, and the Fluid Text: Versions of the MIT
Comparative Media Studies Colloquium, March 19, 2009
Peer-to-Peer2.0 (panel) SXSW Interactive, March 17, 2009
Fair Use panel, Copyright Society of the US, New York Chapter,
February 26, 2009
Ten Years into the Digital Millennium, Virginia Tech, February 20,
2009
Social and Technical Architecture of the Internet,
CNbloggercon. Guangzhou, China, November 16, 2008
Network Openness on Campus, Securing the eCampus. Dartmouth College,
November 11, 2008
The Imperfect is the Enemy of the Good: Anticircumvention
versus User TPRC, September 27, 2008, and Intellectual Property
Speaker Series, Northeastern Univ., October 6 2008
"The Internet's Constitutional Moments," Supernova, San Francisco, CA, June 17, 2008
Fordham Center on Law and Information Policy Symposium, New York, NY,
May 29, 2008 (excerpt
from "Free Speech Unmoored in Copyright's Safe Harbor")
Preserving Openness, Union College, Schenectady, NY, May 28, 2008
American
Society of International Law, Washington, D.C. April 10, 2008 (talk abstract)
"Preserving the Library of the Future," New England Archivists
Annual Meeting, Newport, RI, March 29, 2008
Media Re:Public, Los Angeles, CA, March 28, 2008
Expectations of Privacy for a Database Age, Google Tech Talk,
Kirkland, WA, Jan. 24, 2008 and Harvard Center for Research on
Computation and Society, Feb. 27, 2008
Legal Threats, Chilling Effects and Warming the Air, EDUCAUSE Live, Jan. 23, 2008
Digital
Freedom University, Harvard and Northeastern, October 2007
Protecting the University from Copyright Bullies and Righting the
Copyright Balance, Cornell
University Computer Policy and Law Program, Ithaca, NY, Sept. 27 2007
Search and Privacy, Microsoft Faculty Summit, Redmond, WA, July, 2007
The University and The RIAA, IS2K7, Cambridge, MA, June 1, 2007
Search and Privacy, WWW2007, Banff, May, 2007
Section 230: At the Gates between Liability for Harmful Speech and
Wikipedia (panelist), Wikimania 2006, Cambridge, MA, August 4, 2006
Keynote presentation, "Preserving Privacy as Technologies Change,"
7th Annual IEEE Information Assurance Workshop, West Point, NY, June 22, 2006
DRM: Digital Rights Management or Digital "Restrictions" - DRM in the wake of the Sony "Rootkit" controversy, Association of the Bar of the City of New York, April 11, 2006
Wharton Technology Conference, February 24, 2006
Data Devolution: Corporate Information Security, Consumers
and the Future of Regulation, Fredric G. Levin College of Law, UFL, February 3-4, 2006
UNC Symposium on Intellectual Property, Creativity and the Innovation Process, Chapel Hill, NC, November 1, 2005
Why we care what happens in Paragon City, Austin Game Conference, October 28, 2005 (slides)
Bloggers Rights, BlogHer, Santa Clara, CA, July 30, 2005
Ask EFF, DEF CON 13, Las Vegas, NV, July 29, 2005
Know Your Rights: Legal inoculation for contagious media, Eyebeam Contagious Media Workshop, New York, NY, May 7, 2005
Fear-to-Peer: A debate about filesharing on campus, Princeton, NJ, May 6, 2005
"Endangered Devices and How We Can Save Them," O'Reilly Emerging Technology Conference, San Diego, California, March 14-17, 2005 (presentation) (slides, website) and Computers, Freedom, & Privacy, April 12-15, 2005, Seattle, Wash.
Vermont Law School Solutions Conference, April 8-10, 2005, South Royalton, Vermont
Signal or Noise 2k5, April 8, 2005, Cambridge, Mass.
"Can't we all just get along," South by Southwest Music Festival, March 19, 2005
International Summit on Democracy, Terrorism, and Security, Madrid, Spain, March 8-11, 2005
Not All Fun and Games, Santa Clara Law School Computer and High Technology Law Journal Symposium, February 11, 2005
Regulating Knowledge: Costs, Risks, and Models of Innovation, Brussels, Belgium, November 9-10, 2004 (presentation, software patents, small business, and the public interest)
Internet Service Provider Best Practices, ISPCON, Santa Clara, CA, November 3, 2004
E-Lection 2004 Symposium, John Marshall Law School, Chicago, IL, October 1, 2004 (panel: What's Inside that Black Box, how intellectual property clouds the e-voting picture)
DEF CON 12, Las Vegas, NV, July 30-August 1, 2004 (panels: Ask EFF, Digital Television Liberation)
BlogOn: The Business of Social Media, Berkeley, Cal., July 23, 2004 (panel)
Supernova 2004, Santa Clara, California, June 24-25, 2004 (panel, IP vs. IP: Intellectual Property Meets the Internet Protocol, June 24)
Wizards of OS 3: The Future of the Digital Commons, Berlin, Germany, June 10-12, 2004 (alternative compensation systems panel and workshops June 12); workshop Where next for copyright in the new Europe?, June 13, 2004
Free Bitflows, Vienna, Austria, June 3-4, 2004 (compensation decentral panel June 4)
"Copyright and the Library of the Future," AISTI, Forces of Innovation on Digital Libraries, Santa Fe, NM, May 11, 2004 (presentation)
Computers, Freedom & Privacy, Chilling Effects and Suing File Sharers (panels), Berkeley, CA, April 20-23, 2004
Battling for Ownership of the Arts, Florida Atlantic University, Boca Raton, FL., April 17-18, 2004
Interz0ne III, Atlanta, GA, April 16, 2004
ABA Intellectual Property Law Conference, Washington, DC, April 1-2, 2004
Panel, "Weblogs and the Law," SXSW Interactive, Austin, TX, March 15, 2004
"Reclaiming the Internet," National Education Association conference, Seattle, Washington, March 5, 2004
Panel, "Digital Music: What Does the Future Hold?" Santa Clara Computer & High Technology Law Journal Symposium, Santa Clara, CA, February 6, 2004
Panel, "Online Piracy," California State Bar Association, Beverly Hills, CA, February 2, 2004
Panel, Digital Independence, San Francisco, CA, January 31, 2004
The Freedom to Discover, IDLELO Conference on the Digital Commons, Cape Town, South Africa, Jan 11-15, 2004
Rip, Burn, Sue, (panel) iHollywood Music 2.0, Los Angeles, CA, December 8, 2003
Copyright and the Networked Computer, Washington D.C., November 6-8, 2003
ISPCon, October 20, 2003
What's Happening? Downloading Music, St. Albans Issues Forum, October 17, 2003
Privacy in the Age of Digital Copying, California State Bar Association, Cyberlaw Section, September 6, 2003
August 1-3, 2003 (presentation August 2)
Search Engine Legal Issues, Search Engine Strategies, San Jose, California, August 19, 2003
Pacific Crest Technology Conference, Vail, Colorado, August 12, 2003
The Internet's Private Cops, DEFCON 11,
August 1-3, 2003 (presentation August 2)
Content: Tech, ILAW Stanford, 2003, July 2, 2003 (presentation)
Open
Source Content Management Conference, May 28-30, 2003 (presentation May 30
PPT or openoffice)
"DRM in Practice: Rights, Restrictions, and Reality", O'Reilly Emerging
Technology Conference, April 22-25, 2003 (panel April 23)
Copy
the Rights, Dutch Electronic Arts
Festival, February 26, 2003, 11:00-17:00, Rotterdam (presentation)
"Reconciling the Commons and the Marketplace", The New
Gatekeepers: A Conference on Free Expression and the Arts,
Columbia University National Arts
Journalism Program, November 20-21 2002 (presentation Nov. 21)
(New York Times review, The
Censor and the Artist: A Murky Border)
"Mickey Mice? Potential Ramifications of Eldred
v. Ashcroft", Fordham Intellectual Property, Media &
Entertainment Law Journal Symposium, The State of Intellectual
Property or the Intellectual Property State?, November 8, 2002
DIY Remix Forum, CMJ Music
Marathon, Oct. 31-Nov. 2, 2002 (presentation Nov. 2)
"Trademarks and Free Speech," International Trademark Association's Trademarks in Cyberspace, September 19, 2002 (Brussels), September 25, 2002 (New York)
"Copyright Term Extensions, Opposing Views on the Eldred Case," Association of American Publishers, July 17, 2002
"The Politics of DVD," panelist, DVD Association's DVD
2002, June 3-4, 2002 (presentation June 3)
"Chilling Effects Clearinghouse," Connectivity
2002, May 21-23, 2002 (presentation May 23)
"Eldred v. Ashcroft," panelist, New York State Bar Association,
Intellectual Property Law Section and Cardozo School of
Law, May 22, 2002, 6-8 p.m., Weil Gotshal & Manges
"Who Controls
New Media? Open Art in Closed Systems", Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum,
Peter B. Lewis Theater, March 21, 2002
"Are New Media Replacing Old Media?", panelist, St. John's Law
School Communications Law Conference, March 22, 2002
Music and
Theft: Sampling, Technology, and the Law, A Conference at
Duke Law School, (participant), March 30, 2002
P
(through ISP) to P: The Internet's Other Intermediaries, moderator,
O'Reilly Peer-to-Peer and Web Services Conference,
November 6, 2001
From Open Source to Openlaw: Public Collaboration on Legal Argument, Grassroots Use of the Internet, March 10, 2001
Digital Content Control and the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, guest panelist, Internet & Society 2000, November 28, 2000
Multimedia and the Internet, N.Y. Software Summit, September 25, 2000
Copyright and Plagiarism (PDF), Scholastic Art & Writing Awards Regional Sponsors' Conference, September 22, 2000
Last updated 2017
(cc) Wendy
Seltzer (public key)