Biography
Laura Quilter is an attorney and librarian. She researches and writes on the rights of
information users and creators, and looks at the questions from the broad perspective of a
librarian.
She also regularly speaks to libraries, nonprofits, and audiences of creators, artists,
and mediamakers, on matters of free expression, intellectual property, content licensing, and
privacy.
Laura's interests may be broadly expressed as the effect of information policy on
culture, social justice, and access to knowledge.
Out of those broad interests, one ongoing research program focuses on the nexus of
information controls between creators, third-party gatekeepers, and consumers. From 2004
through 2008, Laura is researching secondary copyright liability and the DMCA safe harbor,
and developing tools and best practices that protect consumer rights.
Related research projects include employee/employer transfers of intellectual property and
the threats such transfers pose to employees' fundamental expressive rights; the use of
"material transfer agreements" in the life sciences; and intellectual property claims in
collaborative creations. She is also working on digital preservation issues, including
licensing for archival purposes and a review of mass digitization contracts. Laura's newest
endeavor is examining the economic and social justice aspects of intellectual property
— specifically, the ways in which new technologies and distribution models will
affect underprivileged persons in both developing nations and economically
underprivileged communities.
Previously:
As an attorney, Laura has worked with numerous consumer interest advocacy groups to
represent the public interest in technology and intellectual property law. Intellectual
property law centrally regulates the flow of information and knowledge in today's society,
and is a key engine of science and technology policy. Specific matters include co-authoring
amicus briefs supporting consumer rights and technological development in Bnetd
(Eighth Circuit) and Grokster (Ninth Circuit, cert. petition at the US Supreme
Court). Laura has also recently worked on the copyright law problems facing digital
archivists, and supervised the DMCA and reverse engineering sections of the Chilling Effects project [chillingeffects.org]. While in law school, Laura
contributed to an amicus brief submitted to the U.S. Supreme Court on behalf of digital
archivists in Eldred v. Ashcroft.
In the speech, privacy and technology law arena, Laura has been particularly interested in
the effects of law and technology on individuals' rights to speak, share, and access
information. In 2004, she worked with clients and co-authored a paper on the impact of RFID
technologies in the information goods sphere, especially libraries. She also worked on
legislation in the California General Assembly to protect the rights of anonymous online
speakers. During her fellowship, one representative matter involved co-counseling a
documentary producer facing defamation and related tort claims, for including portions of
political radio broadcasts in the documentary. As a law student, Laura published a note on
the misuse of a tort doctrine, "trespass to chattel," to compromise speech rights on the
Internet. This note, as well as an amicus brief with which Laura participated in editing,
was cited by the California Supreme Court in Intel v. Hamidi, Cal. Sup. Ct. 2003,
which rejected Intel's attempt to broaden the doctrine in ways that threatened speech. As a
law student, Laura worked on the initial stages of litigation against the California prison
system, which at the time banned all mail sent to prisoners including "Internet content"
— a policy ultimately deemed unconstitutional in Clement v. California Dept. of
Corrections, N.D. Cal. 2003.
Before graduating from UC Berkeley's Boalt Hall School of Law in 2003, Laura was a
librarian, focused on the nexus of science and technology with information access and
education. Just prior to law school, Laura was a librarian at the Exploratorium, the museum
of science, art and human perception in San Francisco. Laura's work at the Exploratorium and
in previous positions focused on enhancing people's access to information, and educating
people about media literacy and how to use the Internet and new technology tools. She helped
establish a community computing center in Chicago; organized a one-day public forum on the
1996 Telecommunications Reform Act; and helped develop an early electronic independent media
group in Chicago in 1995/96. In a prior position as an environmental librarian, Laura
initiated Internet training for an environmental state agency, and heightened public access
to state environmental information.
Laura's interests in social change and technology are also reflected in her ongoing
interest in the history and literature of radical social change movements, including radical
history, anarchist fiction, and feminist science fiction. She frequently speaks on the
intersections of law, technology, information, and their impacts on social change and human
fulfillment. She uses her technical and legal skills in social change movements as well as
professional legal organizations. She has also served on the Computers, Freedom and Privacy
2004 Program Committee, playing a significant role in organizing the conference and its
focuses on intellectual property, telecommunications, and government surveillance. She
currently serves on the American Library Association's Intellectual Property
Subcommittee.
She is admitted to the Bar in California (2003) and Massachusetts (2005), and New York
admission is pending (2007).
Laura Quilter lives in Boston with her partner Michele Markstein, a postdoctoral fellow at Harvard
Medical School who is researching the wholly non-legal regulation of genes.
See also profiles at Free Expression
Policy Project and Samuelson
Clinic (2005).