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Wendy Seltzer

Wendy is a staff attorney with the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) and a Fellow at the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard Law School. Prior to joining EFF, Wendy taught Internet Law as an Adjunct Professor at St. John's University School of Law and was an associate with Kramer Levin Naftalis & Frankel, where she practiced intellectual property and technology litigation. She is a 1999 graduate of Harvard Law School, and a 1996 graduate of Harvard College.

Wendy founded and leads the Chilling Effects clearinghouse, a project to study and combat the ungrounded legal threats that chill activity on the Internet. A collaboration among the EFF and law school clinics across the country, the clearinghouse invites recipients and senders of cease and desist notices to submit these notices for analysis, in issue-spotting FAQ-style memos, and inclusion in its database. The website offers resources for Internet users who face legal threats, and, through its collection of data, the clearinghouse hopes 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.

Wendy also concentrates on the legal issues – licensing and intellectual property rights – presented by open code. She leads the Openlaw project, and its open DVD forum in defense of the DeCSS posters, arguing that technological protections for digital media must accommodate fair use and free speech. Openlaw participants filed an amicus brief in the Southern District of New York in the DeCSS case Universal v. Reimerdes. Wendy later drafted the cryptographers' amicus brief to the Second Circuit in the Reimerdes appeal. Further, Wendy has been involved with the development of the Creative Commons project to offer the public a range of open licenses to promote sharing of creative non-software works.

Invited Presentations:

Wendy continues to work with the open code courseware the Center is developing for classroom use and for the distance lecture and discussion series. Read a description of version 1.0 in action in Teaching with the Bot. From time to time, she also updates the annotation engine, a proxy that predates ThirdVoice in allowing people to post and view notes on remote web pages.

While at Harvard, Wendy led the Berkman Center Representation in Cyberspace Study in conjunction with the ICANN Membership Advisory Committee, and helped to webcast three of ICANN's public meetings. She also led the Center's cybercourse on Privacy in Cyberspace, with Prof. Arthur Miller and was a TF for a college course at UMass Amherst, Law of Cyberspace.

While a student at Harvard, Wendy led the Berkman Center Representation in Cyberspace Study in conjunction with the ICANN Membership Advisory Committee, and helped to webcast three of ICANN's public meetings. She also led the Center's cybercourse on Privacy in Cyberspace, with Prof. Arthur Miller and was a TF for a college course at UMass Amherst, Law of Cyberspace.

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