Zittrain is the son of two attorneys, Ruth A. Zittrain and Lester E. Zittrain. In 2004 with Jennifer K. Harrison, Zittrain published The Torts Game: Defending Mean Joe Greene, a book the authors dedicated to their parents.[3] His brother, Jeff, is an established Bay Area musician.[4][5] His sister, Laurie Zittrain Eisenberg, is a scholar of the Arab and Israeli conflict[6] and teaches at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh.[7]
Zittrain taught, or taught with others, Harvard's courses on Cyberlaw: Internet Points of Control, The Exploding Internet: Building A Global Commons in Cyberspace, Torts, Internet & Society: The Technologies and Politics of Control, The Law of Cyberspace, The Law of Cyberspace: Social Protocols, Privacy Policy, The Microsoft Case, and The High Tech Entrepreneur.[14] He searched for novel ways to use technology unobtrusively in the classroom at Harvard,[15] founded H2O[16] and used the system to teach his classes. Students are polled, assigned opposing arguments, and use H2O to develop their writing skills. Students enrolled in his The Internet and Society class could participate both orally and via the Internet. A teaching fellow seated in the classroom supplied Zittrain with the comments received from students in real time via e-mail as well as through "chat" or "instant message" from students participating in the class while logged into Second Life. (www.secondlife.com)[17]
Between 2001 and 2003 at Harvard's Berkman Center, Zittrain and Benjamin Edelman studied Internet filtering. The OpenNet Initiative (ONI) monitors Internet censorship by national governments. In their tests during 2002, when Google had indexed almost 2.5 billion pages, they found sites blocked, from approximately 100 in France and Germany to 2,000 in Saudi Arabia, and 20,000 in the People's Republic of China. The authors published a statement of issues and a call for data that year.[22]
Building on the work completed at the Berkman Center, ONI published special reports, case studies, and bulletins beginning in 2004,[23] and as of 2008, offered research on filtering in 40 countries as well as by regions of the world.[24] As of 2016, Zittrain remains a principal investigator at ONI, together with Ronald Deibert of the University of Toronto, John Palfrey, who was previously the executive director of the Berkman Center (now the head of School at Phillips Academy in Andover, Massachusetts[25]), and Rafal Rohozinski of the University of Cambridge.[26]
In 2001, Zittrain cofounded Chilling Effects with his students and former students, including its creator and leader, Wendy Seltzer. It monitors cease and desist letters. Google directs its users to Chilling Effects when its search results have been altered at the request of a national government.[15][27] Since 2002, researchers have been using the clearinghouse (renamed "Lumen" in 2015) to study the use of cease-and-desist letters, primarily looking at DMCA 512 takedown notices, non-DMCA copyright, and trademark claims.[28][29]
Copyright
On October 9, 2002, Zittrain and Lawrence Lessig argued a landmark case, known as Eldred v. Ashcroft, before the United States Supreme Court. As co-counsel for the plaintiff, they argued that the Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act (CTEA) was unconstitutional.[30] The court ruled 7–2 on January 15, 2003, to uphold the CTEA which extended existing copyrights 20 years, from the life of the author plus 50 years, to plus 70 years. In the words of Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, the petitioners did "not challenge the CTEA's 'life-plus-70-years' time span itself. They maintain that Congress went awry not with respect to newly created works, but in enlarging the term for published works with existing copyrights." The court found that the act did "not exceed Congress' power" and that "CTEA's extension of existing and future copyrights does not violate the First Amendment".[31] In 2003 Zittrain said he was concerned that Congress will hear the same arguments after the 20-year extension passes, and that the Internet is causing a "cultural reassessment of the meaning of copyright".[32]
After Zittrain joined the staff at Oxford, Zittrain and John Palfrey at the Berkman Center founded StopBadware.org in 2006 to function as a clearinghouse for what has become proliferation of malware.[33] Borrowing Wikipedia's "ethical code that encourages users to do the right thing rather than the required thing",[34] the organization wished to assign the task of data collection—and not analysis—about malware to Internet users at large.[33] When its scans find dangerous code, Google places StopBadware alerts in its search results and rescans later to determine whether a site thereafter had been cleaned.[35]
One of StopBadware's goals is to "preempt" the stifling of the Internet.[36] The founders think that centralized regulation could follow a serious Internet security breach, and that consumers might then choose to purchase closed, centrally managed solutions like tethered appliances that are modified by their vendor rather than owner, or might flee to services in walled gardens. In Zittrain's word, "generative" devices and platforms, including the Internet itself, offer an opening forward.[1] In 2007, he cautioned, "...we're moving to software-as-service, which can be yanked or transformed at any moment. The ability of your PC to run independent code is an important safety valve."[37]
Reactions in the Boston Review accompanied the publication of his book, The Future of the Internet and How to Stop It, in 2008. Support came from David D. Clark and Susan P. Crawford. Criticism ranged from Richard Stallman's finding no evidence of a flight to closed systems and his message that software developers need control and software patents must end,[38] to a request for cost-benefit analysis,[39] to the belief that netizenship will not scale to the business world[40] to faith that consumers will buy only open, non-proprietary systems.[41]
Directed by Palfrey and Zittrain, StopBadware receives high-level guidance from its advisory board: Vint Cerf of Google, Esther Dyson, George He of Lenovo, Greg Papadopoulos (formerly CTO of Sun Microsystems), and Ari Schwartz of the Center for Democracy and Technology. The working group, which has included Ben Adida, Scott Bradner, Beau Brendler, Jerry Gregoire, Eric L. Howes, and Nart Villeneuve at various times, frames the project's research agenda and methodology and is the body which helps to inform the public about StopBadware's work.[42] StopBadware has been supported by AOL, Google, eBay/PayPal, Lenovo, Trend Micro, and VeriSign and its use has been advised by Consumer Reports WebWatch.[43]
Stock markets and spam
Writing with Laura Freider of Purdue University, in 2008 Zittrain published Spam Works: Evidence from Stock Touts and Corresponding Market Activity, in the Hastings Communications and Entertainment Law Journal to document the manipulation of stock prices via spam e-mail.[44] They found evidence that "stocks experience a significantly positive return on days prior to heavy touting via spam" and that "prolific spamming greatly affects the trading volume of a targeted stock". Apart from transaction costs, in some circumstances the spammer earned over 4% while the average investor who bought on the day of receipt of the spam would lose more than 5% if they sold two days later.[45] Frieder said in 2006 that she knew of no other explanation for their results, but that people do follow the stock tips in their spam e-mail.[44]
Frieder, Laura; Zittrain, Jonathan (March 14, 2007). "Spam Works: Evidence from Stock Touts and Corresponding Market Activity". Berkman Center Research Publication No. 2006-11. SSRN920553.
Zittrain, Jonathan (2006). "Searches and Seizures in a Networked World". Harvard Law Review Forum. 83. The Harvard Law Review Association. SSRN916046.
Zittrain, Jonathan L. (May 2006). "The Generative Internet"(PDF). Harvard Law Review. 119. The Harvard Law Review Association: 1974. Retrieved September 8, 2015.
Zittrain, Jonathan (Spring 2006). "A History of Online Gatekeeping"(PDF). Harvard Journal of Law and Technology. 19 (2). Harvard Law School: 253. Retrieved April 20, 2008.
Zittrain, Jonathan (Winter 2004). "Normative Principles for Evaluating Free and Proprietary Software". University of Chicago Law Review. 71 (1). The University of Chicago Law School via SSRN. SSRN529862.
↑ "About ONI". The OpenNet Initiative. Retrieved July 10, 2016.
↑ "About Us". Chilling Effects. Archived from the original on June 3, 2002. Retrieved November 30, 2008.
↑ J. Urban & L. Quilter, "Efficient Process or 'Chilling Effects'? Takedown Notices Under Section 512 of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act," Santa Clara Computer & High Technology Law Journal (March 2006)
↑ Talbot, David (March 2006). "Q&A: Jonathan Zittrain". Technology Review. Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Archived from the original on August 14, 2007. Retrieved April 17, 2008.
↑ Graves, Lucas (January 2007). "End-Time for the Internet". Wired. Vol.15, no.1. CondéNet. p.15. Retrieved April 18, 2008.
↑ Frieder, Laura; Zittrain, Jonathan (March 14, 2007). "Spam Works: Evidence from Stock Touts and Corresponding Market Activity". Berkman Center Research Publication No. 2006-11. SSRN920553.
Eldred v. Ashcroft, 537 U.S. 186 (2003), was a decision by the Supreme Court of the United States upholding the constitutionality of the 1998 Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act (CTEA). The practical result of this was to prevent a number of works from entering the public domain in 1998 and following years, as would have occurred under the Copyright Act of 1976. Materials which the plaintiffs had worked with and were ready to republish were now unavailable due to copyright restrictions.
Lester Lawrence "Larry" Lessig III is an American legal scholar and political activist. He is the Roy L. Furman Professor of Law at Harvard Law School and the former director of the Edmond J. Safra Center for Ethics at Harvard University. He is the founder of Creative Commons and of Equal Citizens. Lessig was a candidate for the Democratic Party's nomination for president of the United States in the 2016 U.S. presidential election but withdrew before the primaries.
Pump and dump (P&D) is a form of securities fraud that involves artificially inflating the price of an owned stock through false and misleading positive statements (pump), in order to sell the cheaply purchased stock at a higher price (dump). Once the operators of the scheme "dump" (sell) their overvalued shares, the price falls and investors lose their money. This is most common with small-cap cryptocurrencies and very small corporations/companies, i.e. "microcaps".
Lumen, formerly Chilling Effects, is an American collaborative archive created by Wendy Seltzer and operated by the Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University. It allows recipients of cease-and-desist notices to submit them to the site and receive information about their legal rights and responsibilities.
The Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society is a research center at Harvard University that focuses on the study of cyberspace. Founded at Harvard Law School, the center traditionally focused on internet-related legal issues. On May 15, 2008, the center was elevated to an interfaculty initiative of Harvard University as a whole. It is named after the Berkman family. On July 5, 2016, the center added "Klein" to its name following a gift of $15 million from Michael R. Klein.
Yochai Benkler is an Israeli-American author and the Berkman Professor of Entrepreneurial Legal Studies at Harvard Law School. He is also a faculty co-director of the Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University. In academia he is best known for coining the term commons-based peer production and his widely cited 2006 book The Wealth of Networks.
John Gorham Palfrey VII is an American educator, scholar, and law professor. He is an authority on the legal aspects of emerging media and an advocate for Internet freedom, including increased online transparency and accountability as well as child safety. In March 2019, he was named the president of the MacArthur Foundation effective September 1, 2019. Palfrey was the 15th Head of School at Phillips Academy in Andover, Massachusetts from 2012 to 2019. He has been an important figure at Harvard Law School and served as executive director of Harvard's Berkman Center for Internet & Society from 2002 to 2008.
Golan v. Holder, 565 U.S. 302 (2012), was a US Supreme Court case that dealt with copyright and the public domain. It held that the "limited time" language of the United States Constitution's Copyright Clause does not preclude the extension of copyright protections to works previously in the public domain.
Wendy Seltzer is an American attorney and, as of January 2023, a staff member at Tucows where she is the Principal Identity Architect. She is known for her many years of work with the World Wide Web Consortium, where, among many roles, she was the chair of the Improving Web Advertising Business Group.
The OpenNet Initiative (ONI) was a joint project whose goal was to monitor and report on internet filtering and surveillance practices by nations. Started in 2002, the project employed a number of technical means, as well as an international network of investigators, to determine the extent and nature of government-run internet filtering programs. Participating academic institutions included the Citizen Lab at the Munk Centre for International Studies, University of Toronto; Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard Law School; the Oxford Internet Institute (OII) at University of Oxford; and, The SecDev Group, which took over from the Advanced Network Research Group at the Cambridge Security Programme, University of Cambridge.
Ethan Zuckerman is an American media scholar, blogger, and Internet activist. He was the director of the MIT Center for Civic Media, and Associate Professor of the Practice in Media Arts and Sciences at MIT until May 2020, and the author of the 2013 book Rewire: Digital Cosmopolitans in the Age of Connection, which won the Zócalo Book Prize. In 2020, he became an associate professor of public policy, communication and information at the University of Massachusetts.
StopBadware was an anti-malware nonprofit organization focused on making the Web safer through the prevention, mitigation, and remediation of badware websites. It is the successor to StopBadware.org, a project started in 2006 at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University. It spun off to become a standalone organization, and dropped the ".org" in its name, in January 2010.
William "Terry" W. Fisher III is the WilmerHale Professor of Intellectual Property Law at Harvard Law School and faculty director of the Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society. His primary research and teaching areas are intellectual property law and legal history.
Luis Villa is an American attorney and programmer who is Co-Founder and General Counsel for Tidelift.
Information technology law, also known as information, communication and technology law or cyberlaw, concerns the juridical regulation of information technology, its possibilities and the consequences of its use, including computing, software coding, artificial intelligence, the internet and virtual worlds. The ICT field of law comprises elements of various branches of law, originating under various acts or statutes of parliaments, the common and continental law and international law. Some important areas it covers are information and data, communication, and information technology, both software and hardware and technical communications technology, including coding and protocols.
David Weinberger is an American author, technologist, and speaker. Trained as a philosopher, Weinberger's work focuses on how technology — particularly the internet and machine learning — is changing our ideas, with books about the effect of machine learning’s complex models on business strategy and sense of meaning; order and organization in the digital age; the networking of knowledge; the Net's effect on core concepts of self and place; and the shifts in relationships between businesses and their markets.
The Digital Public Library of America (DPLA) is a US project aimed at providing public access to digital holdings in order to create a large-scale public digital library. It officially launched on April 18, 2013, after two-and-a-half years of development.
Eric Goldman is a law professor at Santa Clara University School of Law. He also co-directs the law school's High Tech Law Institute and co-supervises the law school's Privacy Law Certificate.
Dennis S. Karjala was an American intellectual property law professor at Arizona State University. His major interests in teaching and research were primarily in the area of intellectual property, specifically in copyright and its applications in digital technologies. His work in the field of intellectual property was internationally recognized and complemented by his ease in speaking and writing in Japanese.
James W. Mickens is an American computer scientist and the Gordon McKay Professor of Computer Science at Harvard John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences at Harvard University. His research focuses on distributed systems, such as large-scale services and ways to make them more secure. He is critical of machine learning as a boilerplate solution to most outstanding computational problems.
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