Kyle K. Courtney, both lawyer and librarian, is the Director of Copyright and Information Policy for Harvard Library. He works closely with the Harvard community to establish a culture of shared understanding of information policy and copyright issues among staff, faculty, and students. His “Copyright First Responders” initiative is in its 10th year at Harvard, and he runs a parallel national network that has spread the program to libraries, archives, museums, and other cultural institutions in Alaska, Arizona, California, Nebraska, New Hampshire, Oregon, Rhode Island, and Washington. He is also an advisor to the American Law Institute, helping to write the "Restatement of Copyright, First." In 2014, he co-founded Fair Use Week, now an international celebration sponsored annually by over 100+ universities, libraries, and other institutions. He also currently teaches research sessions at Harvard Law School, training first year law students on the fundamentals of legal research as part of the Legal Research and Writing program.
He also currently maintains a dual appointment at Northeastern University: teaching “Cyberlaw: Privacy, Ethics, and Digital Rights” for the interdisciplinary Cybersecurity program at the Khoury College of Computer Science and teaching both "Legal Research and Writing for LLM's" and the "Advanced Legal Writing Workshop" at the Northeastern University School of Law.
In 2020 he co-founded a new non-profit organization called "Library Futures" which empowers libraries to take control of their digital futures. He is an internationally recognized speaker on the topic of copyright, technology, libraries, and the law. He holds a J.D. with distinction in Intellectual Property Law and an MSLIS. His writing has appeared in Politico, The Hill, Law Library Journal, and other publications. He co-authored the seminal "White Paper on Controlled Digital Lending of Library Books" and his latest forthcoming work is in "Copyright & Censorship: Historical Dangers of Licensing Regimes in the Digital Age" by Cornell University Press.
