Jonathan Zittrain
Jonathan Zittrain
Jonathan L. Zittrain is an American professor of Internet law and the George Bemis Professor of International Law at Harvard Law School. He is also a professor at the Harvard Kennedy School, a professor of computer science at the Harvard School of Engineering and Applied Sciences, and co-founder and director of Harvard's Berkman Center for Internet & Society. Previously, Zittrain was Professor of Internet Governance and Regulation at the Oxford Internet Institute of the University of Oxford and visiting professor...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionEducator
Date of Birth24 December 1969
CountryUnited States of America
To me, Congress would have been wise to say 'If you build a system that approximates the balance of rights with copyright itself, we'll protect it. If you go overboard, you are on your own,' ... It would have been a harder act to create because it would have had a gray zone ... but that's what we pay legislators to do -- to write subtle legislation.
How an individual's reputation is protected online is too important and subtle a policy matter to be legislated by a high court, which is institutionally mismatched to the evolving intricacies of the online world.
Purchasing and downloading a book on to your e-reader won't necessarily protect it from disappearing.
Thanks to iCloud and other services, the choice of a phone or tablet today may lock a consumer into a branded silo, making it hard for him or her to do what Apple long importuned potential customers to do: switch.
Technologically, the Internet works thanks to loose but trusted connections among its many constituent parts, with easy entry and exit for new ISPs or new forms of expanding access.
Attacks on Internet sites and infrastructure, and the compromise of secure information, pose a particularly tricky problem because it is usually impossible to trace an attack back to its instigator.
Digital books and music are often different from their physical counterparts in that consumers buy licences to a work, revocable under an ongoing contract, rather than their own copies.
Content zips around the Internet thanks to code - programming code. And code is subject to intellectual property laws.
I think social networking is absolutely here to stay. Now, whether or not the label will Facebook forever, depends in part, I think, on whether Facebook wants to try to be less proprietary, be more central to the operation of defining and stewarding identity online.
You can already see the privacy debate moving to the realm of automated massive data mining. When governments begin to suspect people because of where they were at a certain time, it can get very worrying.
When I think about privacy on social media sites, there's kind of the usual suspect problems, which doesn't make them any less important or severe; it's just we kind of know their shape, and we kind of know how we're going to solve them.
I think this is a very ripe time to take on some of the hardest questions. It's not a crazy position to say that these companies should not be there at all - but that's not my view, and I think there are ways to begin drawing lines so that there are ways that the companies can make the world better by being there.
The problem is, 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.
(With the DMCA) you have the sword of Damocles,