Information Society Project

 

Jonathan Zittrain holds the Chair in Internet Governance and Regulation at Oxford University and is a principal of the Oxford Internet Institute. He is also the Jack N. and Lillian R. Berkman Visiting Professor for Entrepreneurial Legal Studies at Harvard Law School, where he co-founded Harvard Law School's Berkman Center for Internet & Society in 1996.  With students, he began Chilling Effects, a web site that tracks and archives legal threats made to Internet content producers. Google now sends its users to Chilling Effects when it has altered its search results at the behest of national governments.

His research interests include battles for control of digital property and content, cryptography, electronic privacy, the roles of intermediaries within Internet architecture, and the useful and unobtrusive deployment of technology in education. He was co-counsel with Lawrence Lessig in Eldred v. Ashcroft, which challenged the Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act of 1998.  The case lost 7-2 at the Supreme Court.

He performed the first large-scale tests of Internet filtering in China and Saudi Arabia in 2002, and now as part of the OpenNet Initiative he has co-edited a study of Internet filtering by national governments, "Access Denied: The Practice and Policy of Global Internet Filtering."

His book about the future of the now-intertwined Internet and PC will be available in spring 2008 from Yale University Press and Penguin UK -- and under a Creative Commons license. Papers may be found at <http://www.jz.org>.

 

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Michael Zimmer, PhD
Microsoft Resident Fellow, Information Society Project, Yale Law School
e: michael.zimmer@yale.edu
w: http://michaelzimmer.org