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This is a Berkman Klein alum page. The information below may be out of date.

Wendy Seltzer is Strategy Lead and Counsel to the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) at MIT, improving the Web's security, availability, and interoperability through standards. As a Fellow with Harvard's Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society, Wendy founded the Lumen Project (formerly Chilling Effects Clearinghouse), helping to measure the impact of legal takedown demands on the Internet. She seeks to improve technology policy in support of user-driven innovation and secure communication.

She serves on the Advisory Board of Simply Secure; served on the founding boards of the Tor Project and the Open Source Hardware Association, and on the boards of ICANN and the World Wide Web Foundation.

Wendy has been researching openness in intellectual property, innovation, privacy, and free expression online as a Fellow with Harvard's Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society, Yale Law School's Information Society Project, Princeton University's Center for Information Technology Policy and the University of Colorado's Silicon Flatirons Center for Law, Technology, and Entrepreneurship in Boulder. She has taught Intellectual Property, Internet Law, Antitrust, Copyright, and Information Privacy at American University Washington College of Law, Northeastern Law School, and 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.

 

Previously, she was a staff attorney with online civil liberties group Electronic Frontier Foundation, specializing in intellectual property and First Amendment issues, and a litigator with Kramer Levin Naftalis & Frankel.

Wendy speaks and writes on copyright, trademark, patent, open source, privacy and the public interest online. She is currently co-authoring an update to Blown to Bits.

She has an A.B. from Harvard College and J.D. from Harvard Law School, and occasionally takes a break from legal code to program.


Projects & Tools

Lumen

Lumen collects and studies online content removal requests, providing transparency and supporting research and analysis of the Web's notice and takedown ecosystem, in terms of who…

Past

Annotation Engine

The Annotation Engine is a set of Perl scripts and a database that allows readers anywhere to add comments to web pages anywhere else.

Copyright for Librarians

The Berkman Center partnered with eIFL to deliver a distance learning program on copyright for librarians. The resulting curriculum, made available on March 24, 2010, can be used…

Past

Digital Media Law Project

Founded in 2007 as the "Citizen Media Law Project," the Digital Media Law Project (DMLP) works to ensure that individuals and organizations involved in online journalism and…

Past

Input to ICANN Accountability and Transparency Review Process

The Berkman Center conducted an independent, exploratory study analyzing ICANN’s decision-making processes and communications with stakeholders.

Past

Openlaw

[Berkman Project 2001-2002] Openlaw is an experiment in crafting legal argument in an open forum.


Publications

Sep 30, 2005

The Broadcast Flag: It's Not Just TV

It's not about the television. Or rather, it's not about television as broadcast to the passive consumer, to be received on single-purpose boxes. It's about television as it could…


News

Feb 15, 2011

Questions for Secretary Clinton concerning "Internet freedom"

Faculty associate Matthew Hindman provoked an energetic email exchange among members of the extended Berkman Center community today, in anticipation of Secretary Clinton's …


Community

Personhood Credentials

Artificial intelligence and the value of privacy-preserving tools to distinguish who is real online

Wendy Seltzer and Tom Zick consider the efficacy of implementing "personhood credentials" as means to deter bad actors online while maintaining users' anonymity.

Aug 26, 2024

Courses

The Law of Cyberspace - Spring 1999

This course will explore a series of leading Internet issues via a number of traditional and not-so-traditional methods. The course themes will include: whether the internet will…


Events

Sep 18, 2007 @ 12:30 PM

The Future of Net - One Web Day / Berkman's 10th Anniversary

Wendy Seltzer, Judith Donath, Gene Koo, and Jonathan Zittrain

Berkman Fellows and Faculty Judith Donath, Gene Koo, Wendy Seltzer, and Jonathan Zittrain discuss The Future of the Internet, in celebration of OneWebDay.

Jul 16, 2007 @ 12:00 AM

The Summer Doctoral Programme (SDP)

The Summer Doctoral Programme (SDP) is a joint effort of the Berkman Center and the Oxford Internet Institute, which provides top doctoral students from around the world with the…

Event
Apr 17, 2007 @ 12:30 PM

Sacked by Copyright: DMCA Takedowns and Free Expression

Wendy Seltzer, Berkman Fellow

Wendy Seltzer, founder of Chilling Effects, discussed "Sacked by Copyright: DMCA Takedowns and Free Expression."

Oct 31, 2006 @ 12:30 PM

Unwag the Dog: How Copyright is Misdirecting Technology Policy with Some Thoughts on Turning it Around

Wendy Seltzer, Berkman Fellow

Wendy Seltzer discussed "Unwag the Dog: How copyright is misdirecting technology policy, with some thoughts on turning it around"