School/Work

I am a visiting assistant professor of law at Northeastern University Law School, researching intellectual property, privacy, and free expression online. As a Fellow with Harvard's Berkman Center for Internet & Society, I founded and lead the Chilling Effects Clearinghouse, helping Internet users to understand their rights in response to cease-and-desist threats. I serve on the Board of Directors of Tor, promoting privacy and anonymity research, education, and technology.

I have taught Internet Law, Copyright, and Information Privacy at Brooklyn Law School and 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 speak frequently on copyright, trademark, open source, and the public interest online. I have an A.B. from Harvard College and J.D. from Harvard Law School, and occasionally take a break from legal code to program (Perl).

I developed and now coordinate the Berkman Center's Openlaw project, bringing the model of open source and free software development to legal argument in the public interest. Openlaw connects lawyers and non-lawyers to develop arguments, strategies, and amicus briefs in important cases. In the Openlaw/DVD forum, we recently filed an amicus brief in Universal v. Reimerdes, one of the first cases testing the anticircumvention provisions of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. Eight major movie studios sued 2600 magazine over the posting of DeCSS--a program that can decrypt and read the data on commercial DVDs. Plaintiff movie studios claimed at trial that DeCSS illegally circumvented their DVD movies' access controls, while defendants argued that the DMCA did not create a new right to block fair use and interoperability through encryption. The Openlaw participants' brief argued that the DeCSS program, and particularly hyperlinks to it, were protected speech under the First Amendment. I also helped to draft the cryptographers' amicus to the Second Circuit, arguing that a ban on computer programs that could be used for circumvention unduly restricted scientific communication.

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