I am a Visiting Professor of Law at Brooklyn Law School and a fellow with the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard Law School.  I came to Brooklyn after three years as a staff attorney with the Electronic Frontier Foundation.

I founded and developed the 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.

My work at the Berkman Center focuses on the legal issues and intellectual property questions surrounding Free Software. I helped to start and now lead 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 has 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. Finally, I have been working with the Creative Commons project to offer the public a range of open licenses to promote sharing of creative non-software works.