Jonathan Zittrain

Jonathan Zittrain
Born	1969 (age 38–39)
Nationality	American
Alma mater	Yale University, Harvard Law School, John F. Kennedy School of Government
Occupation	Professor
Employers	University of Oxford, Harvard University, New York University
Website http://futureoftheinternet.org/blog/ http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/people/jzittrain

Jonathan L. Zittrain (born 1969) is an American professor of Internet law at the Oxford Internet Institute of the University of Oxford; co-founder, visiting professor and researcher at the Berkman Center for Internet & Society of Harvard University; visiting professor at the New York University School of Law; author, most recently, of The Future of the Internet and How to Stop It; and co-editor of the book Access Denied.

Zittrain works in several intersections of the Internet with law and policy including intellectual property, censorship and filtering for content control and computer security. He founded an organization that develops classroom tools. Zittrain is considered to be a member of the digerati.^[1]

Family and education

Zittrain speaking at iSummit07

Zittrain is the son of two attorneys, Ruth A. Zittrain and Lester E. Zittrain, who was the personal attorney of professional football star Joe Greene. In 2004 with Jennifer K. Harrison, Zittrain published The Torts Game: Defending Mean Joe Greene, a book the authors dedicated to their parents.^[2] Zittrain is sometimes referred to as "JZ".^[3]

Zittrain graduated in 1987 from Shady Side Academy, a private school in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.^[4] He holds a bachelor's summa cum laude in cognitive science and artificial intelligence from Yale University, 1991, a J.D. magna cum laude from Harvard Law School, 1995, and a master's in public administration from Harvard's John F. Kennedy School of Government, 1995.^[5][6]

He was law clerk for Stephen F. Williams of the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit and served with the U.S. Department of Justice and in 1991 with the Department of State and at the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence in 1992 and 1994.^[7] A longtime sysop for an online service, Zittrain served as chief administrator for CompuServe's forum for its administrators.^[6]

Later career

Zittrain joined the staff of the University of Oxford in Oxford in the United Kingdom as of September 2005.^[8] He holds the Chair in Internet Governance and Regulation, is a principal of the Oxford Internet Institute, and is a Professorial Fellow of Keble College, which has developed a particular interest in computer science and public policy.^[8] In the U.S., he is also the Jack N. & Lillian R. Berkman Visiting Professor for Entrepreneurial Legal Studies at Harvard Law School in Cambridge, Massachusetts and director and founder with Charles Nesson of its Berkman Center for Internet & Society. Zittrain was a visiting professor at the Stanford Law School in 2007^[9] and is a visiting professor at New York University School of Law in New York City for the spring 2008 semester.

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.^[10] He searched for novel ways to use technology unobtrusively in the classroom,^[11] founded H2O^[12] at Harvard 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 him with the email comments received from students in real time.^[13]

He has been critical of the process used by ICANN, the International Telecommunication Union and the World Summit on the Information Society.^[14] Although he describes their approach as in some ways simple and even naive, Zittrain sees more hope in the open Internet Engineering Task Force model and in the ethical code and assumption of good faith that govern Wikipedia.^[15] He wrote in 2008, "Wikipedia—with the cooperation of many Wikipedians—has developed a system of self-governance that has many indicia of the rule of law without heavy reliance on outside authority or boundary."^[15]

Internet filtering

Zittrain speaking

The OpenNet Initiative (ONI) monitors Internet censorship by national governments. Between 2001 and 2003 at Harvard's Berkman Center, Zittrain and Benjamin Edelman studied Internet filtering. 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 China. The authors published a statement of issues and a call for data that year.^[16] Zittrain and his students co-founded Chilling Effects, a site that monitors cease and desist letters.^[12] When its search results have been altered at the request of a national government, Google directs its users there.^[11]

Building on the work done at the Berkman Center, ONI published special reports, case studies and bulletins beginning in 2004,^[17] and as of 2008, offered research on filtering in 40 countries as well as by region of the world.^[18] Today at ONI, with Ronald Deibert of the University of Toronto, John Palfrey who is the executive director of the Berkman Center, and Rafal Rohozinski of the University of Cambridge, Zittrain is a principal investigator.^[19]

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-counsels for the plaintiff, they believed the Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act (CTEA) was excessive.^[20] The court ruled 7–2 on January 15, 2003 to extend 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".^[21] Zittrain said in 2003 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".^[22]

In 2005, with Palfrey and William W. Fisher of Harvard, Zittrain filed an amicus brief in MGM Studios, Inc. v. Grokster, Ltd.^[23] Twenty-eight entertainment companies lost their case when the Supreme Court ruled on June 23, 2005 that StreamCast Networks -- the makers of Morpheus, Grokster, and KaZaA, were not liable for copyright infringements "that may be committed by end-users of the tool".^[24] Fred von Lohmann, senior staff attorney for the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) who defended StreamCast, published follow up material as did the EFF.^[25][24]

Security

Zittrain and Lawrence Lessig speaking at Google in 2008

After Zittrain joined the staff at Oxford, Oxford and the Berkman Center founded StopBadware.org in 2006 to function as a clearinghouse for what has become proliferation of malware.^[26] Borrowing Wikipedia's "ethical code that encourages users to do the right thing rather than the required thing",^[27] the organization wished to assign the task of data collection—and not analysis—about malware to Internet users at large.^[26] When its scans find dangerous code, Google places StopBadware alerts in its search results and rescans later to determine whether a site had been cleaned.^[28]

One of StopBadware's goals is to "preempt" the stifling of the Internet.^[29] 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 said, "...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."^[30] In 2008, he said, "I [might] realize that I didn't buy a toaster, I entered into a relationship with a vendor for breakfast satisfaction. That greatly changes the balance of power." ^[31]

Reactions in the Boston Review accompanied the publication of The Future of the Internet and How to Stop It in 2008. Support came from David D. Clark and Susan 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,^[32] to a request for cost-benefit analysis^[33] to the belief that netizenship won't scale to the business world^[34] to faith that consumers will buy only open, non-proprietary systems.^[35]

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 of Sun Microsystems and Ari Schwartz of the Center for Democracy and Technology. The working group of Ben Adida, Scott Bradner, Beau Brendler, Jerry Gregoire, Eric L. Howes and Nart Villeneuve frames the project's research agenda and methodology and is the body who informs the public about StopBadware's work.^[36] StopBadware is supported by AOL, Google, eBay/PayPal, Lenovo, Trend Micro and VeriSign and is advised by Consumer Reports WebWatch.^[37]

Stock markets and spam

In 2006^[38] or 2007 with Laura Freider of Purdue University, Zittrain published Spam Works: Evidence from Stock Touts and Corresponding Market Activity to document the manipulation of stock prices via spam email. 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, the spammer in some circumstances 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.^[39] 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 email.^[38]

Recent publications

• Zittrain, Jonathan (April 14, 2008). The Future of the Internet and How to Stop It. Yale University Press. ISBN 0-30-012487-2. 

• Deibert, Ronald J., John G. Palfrey, Rafal Rohozinski, Jonathan Zittrain (Eds.) (February 29, 2008). Access Denied: The Practice and Policy of Global Internet Filtering. MIT Press. ISBN 0-26-254196-3. 

• Frieder, Laura and Zittrain, Jonathan (March 14, 2007). "Spam Works: Evidence from Stock Touts and Corresponding Market Activity". Berkman Center Research Publication No. 2006-11. Retrieved on 2008-04-17.

• Zittrain, Jonathan (2006). "Searches and Seizures in a Networked World". Harvard Law Review Forum 83. The Harvard Law Review Association. Retrieved on 2008-04-20. 

• Zittrain, Jonathan L. (May 2006). "The Generative Internet". Harvard Law Review 119: 1974. The Harvard Law Review Association. Retrieved on 2008-04-20. 

• Zittrain, Jonathan (Spring 2006). "A History of Online Gatekeeping" (PDF). Harvard Journal of Law and Technology 19 (2): 253. Harvard Law School. Retrieved on 2008-04-20. 

• 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. Retrieved on 2008-04-20. 

Notes

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Jonathan Zittrain