About

The opinions and scholarship communicated on this website are the author’s own, expressed in his personal capacity. 

Kyle K. Courtney is a lawyer and librarian serving as the Director of Copyright and Information Policy at Harvard University, working out of the Harvard Library. His award-winning “Copyright First Responders” initiative is in its tenth year, and has spread beyond Harvard to reach libraries, archives, museums, and cultural institutions across the U.S. He is a published author and nationally recognized speaker on the topics of copyright, libraries, and the law. In 2014, he founded Fair Use Week, now an international celebration sponsored annually by over 100+ universities, libraries, and other institutions.

He has a fellowship at NYU Law’s Engelberg Center on Innovation Law & Policy, is a member of the U.S. Supreme Court Bar, an Advisor to the American Law Institute’s project on the Restatement of Copyright, and co-founder and Board Chair of Library Futures and eBook Study Group.  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 maintains a dual appointment at Northeastern University: teaching “Cyberlaw: Privacy, Ethics, and Digital Rights” for the interdisciplinary Information Assurance and Cybersecurity program at the Khoury College of Computer Science and teaches both “Legal Research and Writing for LLM’s” and the “Advanced Legal Writing Workshop” at the Northeastern University School of Law.

His writing on copyright has appeared in Politico, The Hill, Library Journal, American Libraries and other publications. He co-authored the seminal work “A White Paper on Controlled Digital Lending (CDL).” He holds a J.D. with distinction in Intellectual Property Law and an MSLIS.