Primavera De Filippi


Primavera De Filippi is a legal scholar, Internet activist and artist, whose work focuses on the blockchain, peer production communities and copyright law. She is permanent researcher at the CNRS and Faculty Associate at the Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University. She is author of the book Blockchain and the Law published by Harvard University Press. As an activist, she is part of Creative Commons, the Open Knowledge Foundation and the P2P Foundation, among others.

Education

Her interdisciplinary background is grounded in a wide range of academic studies. She holds an undergrad and Masters studies in Economics and Management, a Masters in Intellectual Property, and a PhD in Law.
In her PhD thesis, she explored the legal challenges of copyright law in the digital environment, with special attention to the mechanisms of private ordering.

Career

During her PhD at the European University Institute, she was visiting scholar in both the University of Buffalo working with Barry Smith, and the University of California at Berkeley working with Molly Shaffer Van Houweling.
In 2010, she joined the Centre for Administrative Science Research at CNRS and Universite de Paris II, working with Danièle Bourcier. She has been affiliated with the center since then, first as postdoctoral researcher, and since 2017 as a permanent researcher.
In 2013, she became a fellow of the Berkman Center for Internet and Society, and during two years she researched there the concept of "governance by design" and its relation with cloud computing and peer-to-peer technologies. In 2015, she was promoted to the role of faculty associate at the center, which she holds nowadays.
She has held status of visiting researcher in several institutions: in 2014, in the Institute for Technology & Society of Rio de Janeiro, and in 2017 in both the WZB Berlin Social Science Center and the European University Institute. She was also one of the leading researchers in, the leading European project on Commons-based peer production, and is part of the editorial board of several journals, including: Digital Finance, Frontiers in Human Dynamics and the Journal of Open Hardware
In 2019, she received an ERC grant with the project "BlockchainGov" to research blockchain governance.

Activism and art

Activism

Beyond her academic work, De Filippi has engaged in several activist and practitioner activities promoting the expansion of openness, democratic governance, peer-to-peer, or blockchain. In 2010, she joined the Open Knowledge Foundation as the coordinator of the public domain working group, through which she actively contributed to the making of the Public Domain Calculators. In 2012, she co-established the French chapter of the Open Knowledge Foundation. Since 2011, she is co-founder of the International Communia Association for the promotion and the preservation of the digital public domain, and legal expert for Creative Commons France. Since 2016, she joined the advisory board of the P2P Foundation. In the frame of the Internet Governance Forum, she has co-founded the dynamic coalitions on platform responsibility, network neutrality and blockchain technology.

Community building

Since 2015, she is the director and co-founder of the international organization Coalition for Automated Legal Applications which promotes the use of blockchain technologies for the social good. Under this frame, she has co-organized series of workshops around blockchain technologies in multiple international venues, including Harvard, Stanford, London, Hong Kong, Sidney, EU Parliament, NYU, Kenya and Davos.
In 2015, she co-founded the Backfeed project, a decentralized reputation and value system built on the blockchain. She is currently part of the DAOstack project, a framework for blockchain-based decentralized autonomous organizations.

Art and journalism

De Filippi has been also a reputed artist, combining several forms of art with concepts around free culture and blockchain. Her latest and most popular works revolve around the plantoid, a "blockchain-based life form". She has also written Op'Eds in mainstream media such as Harvard Business Review, Wired or Vice's Motherboard.

Work

She has published more than 70 papers in the topics of blockchain, commons, cloud computing, peer-to-peer technologies and copyright law. Her works on the interactions of blockchain and law are regarded as substantially relevant in the young field of blockchain. In fact, her book Blockchain and the Law was considered "an important new book" and a "deeply-researched book that can be expected to show up on law school syllabi for years to come" by Fortune, and was valued as a critical lense in The New York Times Book Review. Her research in blockchain is often considered a reference on the field by popular media, such as Forbes, Al Jazeera, Le Point, or France 24. She is also one of the 25 leading figures on the Information and Democracy Commission launched by Reporters Without Borders.

Scientific and social recognitions