Archiving the future: law, technology, and practice at the web’s edge

Wendy Seltzer, W3C

Do parties have the right to be forgotten from a smart contract’s ledger? Will taxidermy preserve a Pokémon or a Cryptokitty outside its native habitat? How do we maintain historical records when “truth isn’t truth” and social networks claim sovereignty over the platforms from which they irregularly block users? Can we inoculate before copyright takedown-bots go viral?

By examining some of the challenges to archiving the near and possible futures, this talk aims to help us prepare.  We’ll look at some bugs and features of current legal code, and consider law and policy recommendations to help keep the web open to archiving even as it changes.

Wendy Seltzer is Strategy Lead and Counsel to the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) at MIT, improving the Web’s security, availability, and interoperability through standards. As a Fellow with Harvard’s Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society, Wendy founded the Lumen Project (formerly Chilling Effects Clearinghouse), helping to measure the impact of legal takedown demands on the Internet. She seeks to improve technology policy in support of user-driven innovation and secure communication.

She serves on the Advisory Board of Simply Secure; served on the founding boards of the Tor Project and the Open Source Hardware Association, and on the boards of ICANN and the World Wide Web Foundation.

Wendy has been researching openness in intellectual property, innovation, privacy, and free expression online as a Fellow with Harvard’s Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society, Yale Law School’s Information Society Project, Princeton University’s Center for Information Technology Policy and the University of Colorado’s Silicon Flatirons Center for Law, Technology, and Entrepreneurship in Boulder. She has taught Intellectual Property, Internet Law, Antitrust, Copyright, and Information Privacy at American University Washington College of Law, Northeastern Law School, and Brooklyn Law School and was a Visiting Fellow with the Oxford Internet Institute, teaching a joint course with the Said Business School, Media Strategies for a Networked World. Previously, she was a staff attorney with online civil liberties group Electronic Frontier Foundation, specializing in intellectual property and First Amendment issues, and a litigator with Kramer Levin Naftalis & Frankel.

Wendy speaks and writes on copyright, trademark, patent, open source, privacy and the public interest online. She has an A.B. from Harvard College and J.D. from Harvard Law School, and occasionally takes a break from legal code to program (Perl and MythTV).