Jonathan Zittrain

More than a year ago, in a decision that stunned many American Internet companies, Europe’s highest court ruled that search engines were required to grant an unusual right — the “right to be forgotten.” Privacy advocates cheered the decision by the European Court of Justice, which seemed to offer citizens some recourse to what had become a growing menace of modern life: The Internet never forgets...Recent developments — including a French regulator’s order that all of Google’s sites, including American versions, should grant the right to be forgotten — suggest the new right may not end with Europe...“France is asking for Google to do something here in the U.S. that if the U.S. government asked for, it would be against the First Amendment,” said Jonathan L. Zittrain, who teaches digital law at Harvard Law School. He pointed out that, if enacted, the French regulator’s order would prevent Americans using an American search engine from seeing content that is legal in the United States. “That is extremely worrisome to me.”

The complaints that flooded into Texas Auto Center that maddening, mystifying week were all pretty much the same: Customers’ cars had gone haywire. Horns started honking in the middle of the night, angering neighbors, waking babies. Then when morning finally came, the cars refused to start...a check of the dealership’s computers suggested something more sinister at work: Texas Auto Center had been hacked...Physical injuries would make cases against manufacturers of connected devices far stronger, said Jonathan Zittrain, a Harvard law professor who is faculty director for the Berkman Center for Internet and Society. He predicted a coming wave of litigation relying on tort law, a foundational legal principle that can lead to large damage awards when the action of one person or company can be proved to have caused harm to another.“If my heart monitor fails and I die as a consequence, the company can’t say, ‘Oh, it was only software,’ “ Zittrain said. “That’s no defense. That’s not going to fly.”

The Twitter takeover hoax this week is indicative of an overvalued stock market...One study by Laura Frieder of Purdue University and Jonathan Zittrain of Harvard University, found that the stocks mentioned in those otherwise annoying emails experienced a huge price increase, as well as a big jump in volume, after the messages were sent. Clearly, investors’ skepticism is being trumped by an eagerness to believe. As Zittrain told me: “Greed all too easily colors our objectivity,” and this is true for all types of investors.

What is Google’s responsibility to its searchers? In a Thursday panel at the Aspen Ideas Festival, Jonathan Zittrain, a professor of Internet law at Harvard law school, offered a hypothetical that captured why that question is so difficult to answer...Zittrain’s hypothetical raised larger questions about what it means to act in a searcher’s best interests. “Suppose Google is a fiduciary to us, they and Bing decide that they're going to look out for us. And I happen to believe that vaccines are probably bad,” he began. “And I Google ‘should I vaccinate my child?’” “If Google is ‘looking out for me,’” he continued, “should they interpret that in the best way as, you've got to shake this person by the lapels, the way that I presume a doctor would?”

...What is the role of the library in the information age — is it a repository for the great art, a building with free web access, or — as was the initial intention — a place for learning and research? Can it adapt to changing times while staying true to its original mission? Jonathan Zittrain is the director of the Harvard Law School Library, and the author of "Why Libraries (Still) Matter." "Libraries are often the places of last resort to find that thing that nobody bothered to hang onto, but that they later regret losing," Zittrain said Tuesday on Boston Public Radio. "That's kind of the Norway seed bank — that after the apocalypse we can reboot everything courtesy of a handful of the libraries of last-resort, of which the Boston Public Library is also thought of [as] one."

Airing on Monday, May 18, 2015: First up on today's show, Jonathan Zittrain, co-founder of Harvard’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society, joins to to talk about giving people the choice to opt out of being recorded in public on livestreaming apps like Meerkat and Periscope.

For Bitcoin, 2014 was not a good year. The virtual currency's value slumped as scandal after scandal struck, resulting in many people losing significant amounts of money. Over recent months the "cryptocurrency" has stabilised, however it is still worth less than a quarter of its peak value against the dollar. But while Bitcoin's long-term prospects may remain in doubt, some are suggesting that its underlying technology - the Blockchain - has a bright future...But when it comes to putting all this into practice, one Harvard internet law professor thinks he has spotted a flaw. "Why would we assume that now and forever no one entity could command more than half of the computing power of the people mining a Blockchain?" asks Prof Jonathan Zittrain. "I haven't really heard a satisfying answer to that."

Of all the winners of the 2015 Webby Awards, the winner of the law category might have the most lasting effect. And not just because it’s a groundbreaking project. Rather, perma.cc got the nod for an effort that could help solve a major problem for legal analysts and academics: the tendency, over time, of a hyperlink to “rot,” or lose its original URL...The project emerged from the work of three Harvard Law School researchers—professors Jonathan Zittrain and Lawrence Lessig and student Kendra Albert—who noted that only half of all links used in recent Supreme Court decisions were still active at the time they published a 2013 paper on the topic...“Libraries are in the forever business,” Harvard Library Innovation Lab Director Kim Dulin said in a news release. “We developed Perma.cc to allow our users to protect and preserve their sources, no matter where they originate.”

On a daily basis, you probably type dozens of URLs into your browser to get the websites where you read the news, check your email, access your bank records, and shop online. But chances are you don’t know much about the complex, decentralized naming and numbering system that makes it all work behind the scenes—or the worldwide discussion about who should be responsible for overseeing this system when the U.S. government gives up that role at the end of 2015. ...It was Postel, for example, who assigned two-letter country codes to every nation of the world, which is how Tuvalu and Micronesia fortuitously ended up in control of such profitable TLDs. To make it sound more official, Postel was referred to as the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority, or IANA, because, as Harvard Law professor Jonathan Zittrain put it, “As the Internet’s protocols were written up it seemed a little informal to say with a technical document, ‘Well, a guy named Jon performs this function.’ ”

A service that enables courts and researchers to make permanent links to research found on the Web has won a Webby Award for best legal site of 2015. Perma.cc, developed by the Harvard Law School Library and supported by a network of more than 60 law libraries, takes on the widespread problem of broken or defunct Web links, also known as “link rot,” which can that can undermine research by scholars and courts. The problem was explained in a 2013 paper by Harvard Law professors Lawrence Lessig, Kendra Albert and Jonathan Zittrain. Their research detailed in, “Perma: Scoping and Addressing the Problem of Link and Reference Rot in Legal Citations,” revealed that 50% of URLs in U.S. Supreme Court opinions no longer link to the originally cited material. Perma.cc has developed a process to preserve and “vest” links used in research.

Perma.cc, a project that takes on the problem of “link rot” or broken or defunct links in scholarship, has won the prestigious Webby Award for best law site of 2015. Developed by the Harvard Library Innovation Lab, Perma.cc is a web archiving service that helps authors and publishers create permanent links to their online sources, which are preserved by participating libraries.

When Reuben Loewy took up his first teaching gig in 2012, he had a major revelation: The digital revolution has dramatically transformed the way that kids perceive reality....And just a few days ago, the Harvard Internet-law professor Jonathan Zittrain posted a video message on YouTube that coincidentally sounded a lot like Loewy’s elevator pitch for the unit titled "Wikipedia and Open-Source Knowledge." Highlighting the success of the site and lamenting the ineffectiveness of American public education, Zittrain—who authored the 2008 book The Future of the Internet and How to Stop It—suggested that schools integrate Wikipedia into their curricula, asking kids to edit articles and make the case for their edits. He continued: "To me, if I think of an advanced civics class, it’s great to learn that there are three branches of government and X vote overrides a veto. But having the civics of a collective hallucination like Wikipedia also a part of the curriculum, I think, would be valuable."

Internet service providers have filed suit against the FCC over its recent decision to regulate broadband internet as a public utility, alleging the decision hamstrings the ability of private industry to offer customers new and innovative products...Praised by some and reviled by others, the FCC's decision mostly preserved the status quo, says Harvard Law professor Jonathan Zittrain. In a Big Think interview, Zittrain discusses the unusually strong protection the government has given to the internet, which protects users as well as keeps companies from offering a suite of products to its customers.

People don't always like what they see when they Google themselves. Sometimes they have posted things they later regret — like unflattering or compromising photos or comments. And it can be maddening when third parties have published personal or inaccurate material about you online. In Europe, residents can ask corporations like Google to delete those unflattering posts, photos and other online material from online search results. And under the right circumstances, those entities must comply...At the latest event from Intelligence Squared U.S., two teams tackled these questions while debating the motion, "The U.S. Should Adopt The 'Right To Be Forgotten' Online." ...Against the motion...Jonathan Zittrain is the George Bemis Professor of Law at Harvard Law School.

The University of Oklahoma expelled two fraternity members this week after video of them leading a racist chant went viral. Now, a Google search of the young men’s names shows the incident right at the top of the results. But should this still be the case in 30 years?...On Wednesday night at the Kaufman Center in New York City, the Oklahoma frat brothers were discussed as part of a larger debate over whether it’s time for the U.S. to adopt a “right to be forgotten” law to help people hide their past...McLaughlin and Harvard Law’s [Jonathan] Zittrain saved special scorn for the process by which Europe arranges for the “right to be forgotten” to occur, saying it forces Google to choose between an easy path of simply granting the request, or else risking an expensive legal headache. ..Zittrain also took issue with Nemitz’s claim that Europe’s “right to be forgotten” law is not censorship because it merely deletes information from Google, not from the entire Internet. “It’s like saying the book can stay in the library, we just have to set fire to the catalog,” he said.

In 2014, the European Union’s Court of Justice determined that individuals have a right to be forgotten, “the right—under certain conditions—to ask search engines to remove links with personal information about them.” It is not absolute, but meant to be balanced against other fundamental rights, like freedom of expression. In a half year following the Court’s decision, Google received over 180,000 removal requests. Of those reviewed and processed, 40.5% were granted. Largely seen as a victory in Europe, in the U.S., the reaction has been overwhelmingly negative. Was this ruling a blow to free speech and public information, or a win for privacy and human dignity? Debaters include: Jonathan Zittrain.

When Islamic State militants overran northern Iraq late last year they captured enough weapons and equipment from fleeing Iraqi forces to supply three combat divisions. Could remotely operated kill switch technology on weapons stop the same thing happening in future? Antony Funnell investigates.... Watching such developments from his office in Boston, Harvard University law professor Jonathan Zittrain began thinking about the need for smarter weapons: weapons that could be disabled remotely if and when required. His inspiration was right in front of him.‘I was reflecting on the fact that companies like Apple have implemented kill switches for iPhones,’ says Zittrain, the director of the prestigious Berkman Center for Internet and Society. ‘If somebody boosts the phone from you, all is not lost. You can remotely disable it using your own Apple credentials to make it a much less enticing target to steal.

Remember when UK Prime Minister, David Cameron, said that he wanted to pass a law that would compel messaging apps to provide a backdoor for security agencies? That would, in effect, ban encrypted software that has no key. President Barack Obama agreed with him. In response to that proposal, Jonathan Zittrain, a professor of internet law at Harvard University, wrote an open letter to Cameron, explaining why he thinks it’s a “very bad idea.” It’s one thing to try and regulate WhastApp, says Zittrain, because the government knows where Facebook “lives,” and the Silicon Valley company has assets that could be seized. But what happens when someone produces the next wildly popular messaging app? What if that someone happens to be, as Zittrain wrote in his letter, “two caffeine-fueled university sophomores?” They would be pretty hard to regulate, or even find, according to him. “You’re kind of stuck, which means you have to go double or nothing,” says Zittrain. “You now have to try to regulate the entire app ecosystem.”

Intimate, often painful allegations in lawsuits — intended for the scrutiny of judges and juries — are increasingly drawing in mass online audiences far from the courthouses where they are filed...“It’s not clear that lighting a match and dropping it in the public sphere is going to be a reliable way to bring closure,” said Jonathan Zittrain, a Harvard professor of Internet law who compared the practice to the old campus tactic of scrawling the names of alleged rapists on women’s bathroom walls.