TACD IP Policy Committee

Trans Atlantic Consumer Dialogue (TACD) Conference

Patents, Copyrights and Knowledge Governance: The Next Four Years

January 12-13, 2009

Washington, DC

The speakers biographies and policy recommendations to the US government or the European Communities over the next four years.

(in alphabetical order)

Philippe Aigrain

Philippe Aigrain is the CEO of Sopinspace, Society for Public Information Spaces. Sopinspace develops free software and provides commercial services for the organisation of public debates and collaborative work over the Internet. He is active at international level for the recognition of information and knowledge commons and for the promotion of new schemes for creating a synergy between the economy and non-market activities. Dr. Aigrain is a member of the Board of Directors of the Software Freedom Law Center in New-York and of the Board of Trustees of the NEXA Center for Internet and Society in Torino, Italy. He is the author of 2 books : “Common Cause: Information Between Commons and Property” (published in French, Italian and Arabic) and “Internet & Creation: how to recognize Internet exchanges while funding creation” (in French, English version to appear in 2009). He has authored many papers in English and French, most of which are accessible on his blog at http://paigrain.publicdebate.net/?page_id=11.

His policy recommendations for the U.S. Government or the European Communities over the next four years:

Empower the future networked citizens. Consider the appraisal of and contribution to knowledge and technology as an essential component of education at all levels. Accordingly base the use of IT in educational activities on free/open source software, and on use and contribution to open information resources. Stress co-operation as a key ability for the developing individual.

Do not insult the future and repair it. Abstain from creating any irreversible extension of property-like mechanisms for information and knowledge represented by information. Review patent and copyright legislation and treaties in order to remove provisions that are unbalanced in favor of monopoly rent-seeking on knowledge components: gene sequence, software and software-based information processing patents; protection of TPMs even when circumvention is needed to exert legal use; criminal sanctions for non-commercial alleged infringements of IPR; database protection beyond copyright on original works; constraints on creation of new exceptions and limitations beyond a reasonable interpretation of the three-step test.

Open policy options for the joint development of Internet and creation. Consider all workable options to ensure a wide access to culture and knowledge, a rich cultural and knowledge production, and an equitable remuneration of creators. Abstain from focusing on the sole restrictive rights enforcement strategies that have proved to deliver poorly on all three counts. Prepare modifications to the legal and policy framework on these matters by open debates and independent impact studies on options such as collective licensing for non-market P2P exchanges.

Sophie Bloemen

Sophie Bloemen is European Projects Officer with Health Action International, a policy NGO headquartered in Amsterdam. She was educated in Amsterdam, Berlin, Santiago de Chile, Paris and London and has a background in philosophy and European Political Economy, having obtained a MA and MSc from the University of Amsterdam as well as a MSc from  the  London School of Economics.

Sophie started her career as a trainee for the European Commission in Brussels at DG Employment & Social Affairs. In 2007 she founded the Danube Foundation, which aims to contribute to the exchange of ideas and among Central, East, and Western Europe and to the construction of a European public sphere.

In late 2007 Sophie joined Health Action International.  HAI works towards a world in which all people, especially the poor and marginalised, are able to exercise their human right to health. HAI’s contribution is through advocating for increased access to essential medicines and improved rational use of medicines. With regional offices in Africa (Nairobi), Asia Pacific (Colombo), Europe (Amsterdam) and Latin America (Lima) and a Global coordinating office in Amsterdam, HAI is a non-profit, independent, worldwide network of over 200 members including consumer groups, public interest NGOs, health care providers, academics, media and individuals in more than 70 countries.

As Project Officer at Health Action International Europe , Sophie is concerned with promoting access to medicine, focusing in particular on Intellectual Property Rights policy.

Her policy recommendations for the U.S. Government or the European Communities over the next four years:

Apply the competition policy in a more strict fashion in the area of pharmaceuticals.

Move pharmaceuticals dossier from DG Enterprise and Industry to DG Sanco.

Re-assess EU Intellectual Property strategy and policy towards developing countries in order to have it in line with EU commitments in international forums and treaties.

Michelle Childs

Michelle Childs is Director of policy and advocacy at MSF’s Access to Medicines Campaign.

Vera Franz

Vera Franz is Program Manager at the Open Society Institute’s Information Program (http://www.soros.org/ip) since November 2001, heading the Program on Information Law & Policy. In parallel, she has been lecturing a course on ‘Media, Technologies, and Globalisation’ at the Department of Communications at Salzburg University, Austria. Previously, she was affiliated with the Austrian Techno-Z R&D Institute, researching information market developments for the European Commission. She has lived in Croatia and Bosnia-Herzegovina, running Internet projects for local non-governmental organisations. Vera holds a Masters in Media and Communications at the London School of Economics and a MagPhil in Political Science at Salzburg University, Austria.

Her policy recommendations for the U.S. Government or the European Communities over the next four years:

Stop any legislation that will increase the liability of ISPs and violate fundamental human rights of consumers. Collective licensing arrangements and innovative open business models will need to compensate creative activity.

Change international copyright law to ensure that bookshare.org’s 41,000 books (and many more resources for the blind) will be accessible to blind persons all over the world.

Adopt government procurement policies for software that guarantee full interoperability.

Associate Professor Christophe Geiger

Christophe Geiger is Director General of the Centre for International Industrial Property Studies (CEIPI) and Associate Professor at the University of Strasbourg (France), where he teaches intellectual property and competition law. He is also senior researcher at the Max Planck Institute for Intellectual Property, Competition and Tax Law in Munich (Germany), where he is in charge of the Department “France and French-Speaking African countries”. He studied both French and German law at the University of Paris I Panthéon-Sorbonne and the University of Saarbrücken and graduated from both universities. After completing a master degree in intellectual property at the University of Montpellier, he received his doctorate in December 2003 from this university with his thesis Copyright and the Public’s Right to Information. This work received a prize from the French Institut de recherche en propriété intellectuelle (best thesis of the year in IP-Law) and was published in September 2004 by Litec. He then joined the Max Planck Institute and in 2007 the University of Strasbourg. He specializes in national, international and comparative copyright and intellectual property law and takes part in national and international conferences. He has published numerous articles on copyright and intellectual property law.

His policy recommendations for the U.S. Government or the European Communities over the next four years:

To isolate a list of mandatory exceptions/ limitations in international and community legislation and ensure their efficacy against technical protection measures through appropriate and simple mechanisms.

To initiate at european and international level a public and transparent debate on the whole system of exceptions and limitations, allowing each interested group to assess its interests.

To propose at international and community level a guide for interpretation of the rule of “three step test” in respect of all interests at stake.

Professor Hugh C. Hansen

Prof. Hansen teaches United States and European Union intellectual property law. He is the founder and director of the Fordham Annual Conference on Intellectual Property Law and Policy and Director of Fordham’s new IP Institute.

Prof. Hansen is a graduate of Georgetown Law School where he was a member of the Law Journal. He clerked in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York and in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit. He was in practice with the law firm of Dewey Ballantine in New York and then as an Assistant United States Attorney in the Southern District of New York. He has served numerous times as a consultant or expert witness in IP cases in U.S., Europe and the EU Commission. He has also been the lead counsel in copyright and trademark actions.

Prof. Hansen is the author of New York Intellectual Property Law (Lexis Nexis, 2009). He is editor of International Intellectual Property Law and Policy, Volumes 1-7 (Juris Publications), Volume 9 (Hart Publishing), U.S. Intellectual Property Law and Policy (Edward Elgar Publishing, 2006) and the ABA publication Preview (IP associate editor).

Prof. Hansen is a frequent speaker on intellectual property law in the United States, Europe and Asia. He delivered the 30th Annual Brace Lecture of the Copyright Society of the U.S.A, and delivered the Herschel Smith Public Lecture in Intellectual Property Law at Queen Mary University of London. He has had speaking tours in Australia and Japan. He was a visiting professor at Melbourne University and a visiting professorial fellow at Queen Mary Research Institute. He has appeared on or been quoted in the media numerous times including The Economist, Wall Street Journal, New York Times, ABC’s 20/20, and IPR’s On the Media.

Tim Hubbard

Tim Hubbard is responsible for the informatics division of the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute, which is at the vanguard of providing analyses and access to genome and genetic data, particularly of humans. He is joint PI of the Ensembl genome annotation project (http://www.ensembl.org), which is the world’s leading database and access point for the human genome sequence. The Institute was responsible for determining a third of the human genome sequence and with the Wellcome Trust led the policy of immediate release of sequence data into the public domain.

Following the controversy surrounding the ownership and access to the human genome sequence, he became a leading advocate of the benefits of open access and open data release for science and society as a whole. He was a member of the OECD working group on ‘Issues of Access to Publicly Funded Research Data’ (http://dataaccess.ucsd.edu) and is a member of the advisory board of ukPMC (http://ukpmc.ac.uk/ the uk instance of PubMedCentral, the repository for open access biomedical literature). He is also actively involved in government, NGO and industry discussions regarding intellectual property, innovation and public health. He was one of the architects of the R&D Treaty proposal, which would provide a framework for supporting worldwide healthcare research and development in a sustainable way, at the same time as addressing the issue of access to essential medicines.

Professor Bernt Hugenholtz

Bernt Hugenholtz is Professor of Intellectual Property Law and Director of the Institute for Information Law of the University of Amsterdam (IviR; www.ivir.nl). In 1989 he received his doctor’s degree cum laude from the University of Amsterdam, where he defended his thesis on copyright protection of works of facts. He has written numerous books, studies and articles on a variety of topics involving copyright, information technology, new media and the Internet. At the University of Amsterdam he teaches courses in copyright law, international copyright law and industrial property law. He was a member of the Amsterdam Bar and partner of the law firm Stibbe between 1990 and 1998. Since 2003 he has been a deputy judge at the Court of Appeal in Arnhem.

Prof. Hugenholtz is a member of the Dutch Copyright Committee that advises the Minister of Justice of the Netherlands, and has acted as a consultant to the World Intellectual Property Organisation (WIPO), the European Commission, and several national governments. He has been on international missions representing WIPO in China and Indonesia, and is a regular speaker at international conferences.

Prof. Hugenholtz is General Editor of the Information Law Series,which is published by Kluwer Law International. In 2001 he was elected a finalist in the Law category of the World Technology Awards http://www.nature.com/nature/wta.

His policy recommendations for the U.S. Government or the European Communities over the next four years:

Stop further copyright harmonization efforts and start work on a Community Copyright Regulation, i.e. a code that would directly bind the citizens of the EU, and replace both existing directives and national copyright laws in the EU.

Stop the term extension proposal.

Create a coordinating committee inside the European Commission with the task of (1) developing coherent and socially responsible EU copyright policies, and (2) coordinating relevant policies between the DG’s.

Heather Joseph

Heather Joseph joined SPARC as director in July 2005. Heather is responsible for SPARC’s overall program development. She determines and implements SPARC goals; leads SPARC’s advocacy efforts to support widespread adoption of open access to scholarly research; identifies and negotiates partnerships with scholarly publishers; builds coalitions of support; and generally represents the interests and values of SPARC to the stakeholders in scholarly communication.

Before coming to SPARC, the culmination of Heather’s career in scholarly publishing was serving as President and Chief Operating Officer for BioOne, a SPARC publisher partner. Under her leadership, BioOne focused on helping small scholarly societies in the biological sciences remain independent and competitive in the electronic arena, while maintaining academy friendly access policies. For her work in successfully launching and establishing BioOne, Heather was awarded the 2002 Association of Learned and Professional Society Publishers’ Award for Services to Not-for-Profit Publishing. She also served as elected president of the Society for Scholarly Publishing for the 2004-2005 term.

Her policy recommendations for the U.S. Government or the European Communities over the next four years:

Governments should require that primary data resulting from research conducting using public funds be deposited into relevant databases, to be made publicly available upon publication of any article resulting from the data.

Governments should require that the results of all research conducted using public funds be made freely accessible, online, to the public immediately upon publication.

Claudia Juech

Claudia Juech joined the Rockefeller Foundation in July 2007. As a Managing Director, she provides leadership and direction for the development and application of research concepts and tools for the Foundation. She is also tasked with leading efforts to identify and analyze global trends and issues as they relate to current initiative work and opportunities for programmatic investment. In 2008 she was part of the Foundation’s eHealth efforts responsible for the component on Access to Health-related Information and Knowledge. Prior to joining the Rockefeller Foundation, Ms. Juech managed Deutsche Bank Research’s InfoCenter where she aggregated business, trend and competitive information and distributed it to Deutsche’s European staff. Reporting to Deutsche Bank Group’s chief economist, she implemented international information solutions, including the first globally available Knowledge database on European Currency issues at Deutsche Bank. From 2005 to 2007, she chaired the Association of Information Services in the Financial Industry in German speaking Europe. Ms. Juech has a degree in Information Science from the University of Applied Sciences Cologne and an International Master of Business Administration from the University of Cologne.

Konstantinos Karachalios

Konstantinos Karachalios was born in Athens in 1954. He gained a PhD in Physics and Engineering on “Nuclear Reactor Safety”. He works at the European Patent Office in the field of external relations and is co-author of the work Scenarios for the Future. Previous tasks at the EPO: examiner; patent information services; Head of International Academy; designing and delivering technical assistance to developing countries. Publications deal with the topics of culture, politics, science and technology. Most recent ones: Managing Science: is the Cudos still in Place ? (Biotechnology Journal, 2008, 3), and Jürgen Partenheimer in Conversation with Konstantinos Karachalios in “Discontinuity, Paradox & Precision” (Ikon Gallery Birmingham / Kunstmuseum Bonn, April 2008). Key note speaker at the Computer, Freedom and Privacy Conference, Yale, May 2008.

His policy recommendations for the U.S. Government or the European Communities over the next four years:

Improve operation of USPTO: sufficient resources, training, time and recognition for examiners (keep them longer).

Judicial system: specialised patent judges also in first instance (no jury trials!)\

Improve transparency in the market place through better coordination of patent and competition authorities with formal standardisation institutions; clear rules for patents embedded in industrial standards (in particular mandatory ones).

Eddan Katz

Eddan Katz joined EFF as International Affairs Director in 2008, returning from his summer internship in 2000. He is responsible for managing EFF’s international activities, specializing in Access to Knowledge (A2K) and digital rights. Before EFF, Eddan was the first Executive Director of the Yale Information Society Project and was Lecturer-in-Law at Yale Law School. He taught and writes in the areas of cyberlaw, intellectual property, telecommunications, and bioethics. Eddan received his bachelors degree in philosophy from Yale; and his law degree from UC, Berkeley’s Boalt Hall, where he was awarded the Sax Prize for his work with the Samuelson Law, Technology, & Public Policy Clinic. After law school, Eddan worked for Prof. Pam Samuelson as a Visiting Scholar at the School of Information at Berkeley.

His policy recommendations for the U.S. Government or the European Communities over the next four years:

Institutionalize practices and policies of open access publication and royalty-free licensing of government sponsored research and technology to enrich the public domain and to ensure that the benefits of taxpayer funded work and national heritage is disseminated to the general public and preserved for future generations.

Invest in digital education initiatives with open educational resources that encourage participatory learning and collaborative development to prepare the incoming workforce for the skills necessary to be innovative and competitive in the knowledge economy.

Differentiate between counterfeiting and piracy in treaty negotiations and implementing legislation with consideration to the public interest impacts of trade policy and investigate the actual costs and harms of intellectual property enforcement with meaningful participation of civil society in coordination efforts.

Professor Josh Lerner

Josh Lerner is the Jacob H. Schiff Professor of Investment Banking at Harvard Business School, with a joint appointment in the Finance and the Entrepreneurial Management Units. He graduated from w:st=”on”Yale College with a Special Divisional Major which combined physics with the history of technology. He worked for several years on issues concerning technological innovation and public policy, at the Brookings Institution, for a public-private task force in w:st=”on”Chicago, and on Capitol Hill. He then earned a Ph.D. from Harvard’s Economics Department.

Much of his research focuses on the structure and role of venture capital and private equity organizations. (This research is collected in The Venture Capital Cycle, MIT Press, 1999 and 2004, and The Money of Invention, Harvard Business School Press, 2001.) He also examines the impact of intellectual property protection, particularly patents, on the competitive strategies of firms in high-technology industries. (His book with Princeton University Press, Innovation and Its Discontentsaddresses these issues.) He founded, raised funding for, and organizes two groups at the National Bureau of Economic Research-the Entrepreneurship Working Group and the Innovation Policy and the Economy Group-and is a Research Associate in the Corporate Finance and Productivity Programs and serves as a co-editor of their publication Innovation Policy and the Economy.

In the 1993-94 academic year, he introduced an elective course for second-year MBAs on private equity finance. In recent years, “Venture Capital and Private Equity” has consistently been one of the largest elective courses at w:st=”on”Harvard Business School. (The course materials are collected in Venture Capital and Private Equity: A Casebook, John Wiley, now in its fourth edition.) He also teaches a doctoral course on entrepreneurship and in the Owners-Presidents-Managers Program, and organizes an annual executive course on private equity in Boston and w:st=”on”Beijing. He recently led an international team of scholars in a study of the economic impact of private equity for the World Economic Forum.

Paul Alan Levy

Paul Alan Levy is an attorney with the Public Citizen Litigation Group, a public interest law firm that is a division of the consumer advocacy organization Public Citizen. Among the issues on which the group litigates are federal health and safety regulation, consumer litigation, open government, union democracy, separation of powers, and the First Amendment. PCLG litigates cases at all levels of the federal and state judiciaries and have a substantial practice before federal regulatory agencies.

After working as a law clerk to Honorable Wade H. McCree, Jr. (United States Court of Appeals, Sixth Circuit) and Special Assistant to Solicitor General McCree, Paul joined the Litigation Group in December 1977 to represent workers in rank-and-file labor law cases, largely representing dissident union members in cases involving union governance. He has been there ever since, with the exception of a one-year sabbatical when he taught at Cardozo Law School. Over the years, he also developed subspecialties in some arcane issues of federal procedure such as removal jurisdiction, and the representation of “lawyers in trouble” from sanctions, contempt findings and the like; he also pioneered Public Citizen’s work on federal preemption of state law claims.

Paul has specialized more recently in free speech issues arising on the Internet. He has litigated cases in state and federal courts throughout the country about the identification of anonymous Internet speakers. For several years, Paul has chaired subcommittees (on domain name litigation or on keyword advertising) of the American Bar Association’s Intellectual Property Section.

His policy recommendations for the U.S. Government or the European Communities over the next four years:

Amend the Digital Millenium Copyright Act to provide notice and an opportunity to respond before a challenged work must be removed from the Internet, to provide public notice of takedowns, and to provide stronger remedies for Internet speakers whose materials are wrongly removed.

Fred von Lohmann

Fred von Lohmann is a senior staff attorney with the Electronic Frontier Foundation, specializing in intellectual property matters. In that role, he has represented programmers, technology innovators, and individuals in a variety of copyright and trademark litigation, including MGM v. Grokster, decided by the Supreme Court in 2005. He is also involved in EFF’s efforts to educate policy-makers regarding the proper balance between intellectual property protection and the public interest in fair use, free expression, and innovation. Before joining EFF, Fred was a visiting researcher with the Berkeley Center for Law and Technology and an associate with the international law firm of Morrison & Foerster LLP. He has appeared on CNN, CNBC, ABC’s Good Morning America, and Fox News O’Reilly Factor and has been widely quoted in a variety of national publications. Fred has an A.B. from Stanford University and a J.D. from Stanford Law School.

His policy recommendations for the U.S. Government or the European Communities over the next four years:

Recognize the harm to consumers, competition, and innovation that are the legacy of laws designed to protect “digital rights management” (DRM) technologies, and reform those laws (such as the DMCA and EUCD) to restore the proper place of fair use and other limitations and exceptions in digital copyright.

Reject calls for increased Internet surveillance (e.g., network “filtering”) and punitive enforcement measures (e.g., “three strikes” or “graduated response”) in favor of encouraging collective licensing solutions that are fair to both copyright owners and the public.

Stop efforts by US and EUR trade negotiators to impose onerous intellectual property provisions in free trade agreements and other international instruments that reduce the ability of all parties to experiment with new intellectual property approaches, such as those being considered as part of the Development Agenda.

Anne-Catherine Lorrain

Anne-Catherine Lorrain is an intellectual property lawyer. After a professional experience in the music industry (at the French group of IFPI, SNEP) in the early 2000’s, she has worked as a researcher in copyright law at the University of Paris Sorbonne (France). She has also been writing a PhD thesis on the contracts for the online exploitation of music. She has been involved in several academic projects and has been teaching as a University lecturer in IP law and telecommunications law. She has also published several articles (most of which are available on www.aclorrain.fr). She is currently Intellectual Property Expert for the TransAtlantic Consumer Dialogue (TACD) in Brussels (Belgium).

See more on the TACD Intellectual Property working group: www.tacd-ip.org/blog.

Her policy recommendations for the U.S. Government or the European Communities over the next four years:

The U.S. and the E.U. should concretely promote the procurement of software and hardware devices that require open standards compliance.

support a robust work program on limitations and exceptions at the WIPO SCCR, including work on the proposal for a treaty for blind, visually impaired and other reading disabled persons, as well as looking at global norm setting in the areas of distance education, innovative services and other areas where cross border information flows are important.

seriously engage in discussions about alternative reward systems for creative communities that eliminate the need for surveillance of consumers.

James Love

Mr. Love is the Director of Knowledge Ecology International (KEI).  Mr. Love is also the U.S. co-chair of the Trans-Atlantic Consumer Dialogue (TACD) Working Group on Intellectual Property, chair of Essential Inventions, an advisor to the X-Prize Foundation on a prize for TB diagnostics, and a member of the UNITAID Expert Group on Patent Pools, the MSF Working Group on Intellectual Property, the Stop-TB Partnership working group on new drug development and the Internet Governance Forum (IGF) Dynamic Coalition on Open Standards.  He  advises a number of UN agencies, national governments, international and regional intergovernmental organizations and public health NGOs, and is the author of a number of articles and monographs on innovation and intellectual property rights.  In 2006, Knowledge Ecology International received a MacArthur Award for Creative and Effective Institutions.

Mr. Love was previously Senior Economist for the Frank Russell Company, a lecturer at Rutgers University, and a researcher on international finance at Princeton University. He holds a Masters of Public Administration from Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Government and a Masters in Public Affairs from Princeton’s Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs. For the development of new medicines and vaccines, de-link R&D incentives from prices, through the use of innovation inducement prizes liked to open licensing of inventions. There should be sharing of some of the prize money with persons who openly shared the knowledge, data, materials and technology that was important for the development of the new product, through an open source dividend.

His policy recommendations for the U.S. Government or the European Communities over the next four years:

For the development of new medicines and vaccines, de-link R&D incentives from prices, through the use of innovation inducement prizes linked to open licensing of inventions. There should be sharing of some of the prize money with persons who openly shared the knowledge, data, materials and technology that was important for the development of the new product, through an open source dividend.

Support a WIPO Treaty for Blind, Visually Impaired and other disabled persons, modeled after the proposal by the World Blind Union.

Create sustainable institutions to increase the supply of global public goods, including a WHO biomedical R&D treaty, a WTO agreement on the supply of public goods, government procurement policies to promote open standards, and the creation of competitive intermediaries to fund public goods.

Rohit Malpani

Rohit Malpani is a Senior Campaigns Advisor at Oxfam America- an international development and humanitarian agency. He currently manages Oxfam’s access to medicines campaign, provides advice to Oxfam on the intersection of intellectual property and development, and also serves as a corporate campaigns advisors with Oxfam America’s Private Sector Department. Previously, he worked as a human rights advisor to the World Health Organization and the International Labor Organization, and also with local civil society groups in Thailand and Argentina. Mr. Malpani started his legal career as an intellectual property attorney with the law firm of Wilson, Sonsini, Goodrich and Rosati. He has a Doctorate of Jurisprudence from the New York University School of Law and a Bachelor of Arts from Rice University. He was born in Calgary, Canada and raised in Dubai, United Arab Emirates.

His policy recommendations for the U.S. Government or the European Communities over the next four years:

The United States and European Union should stop promoting stricter levels of intellectual property protection that exceed minimum obligations under TRIPS and should not interfere with the rights of developing countries to implement and use basic safeguards to protect public health.

New incentives for research and development, such as prize funds, should be implemented and evaluated with respect to their utility to meet public health needs and to drive innovation for new medicines.

Any inducement awards or financial contributions for research and development should include: open access to any data produced through innovation activities, investments in the capacity of developing countries to conduct research and development, assistance for technology transfer to developing countries, and ensuring that all resulting products from research and development are affordable, including through open licensing of emerging products.

Professor Eric Maskin

Eric Maskin is an economic theorist best known for his work on the theory of mechanism design. For laying the foundations of this field he shared the 2007 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economics. He has also made contributions to game theory, social choice theory, voting theory, monetary theory, contract theory, and the economics of intellectual property, among other areas. He is currently Albert O. Hirschman Professor of Social Science at the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton.

A.B., Harvard University, 1972; Ph.D., Harvard, 1976; Research Fellow, Jesus College, Cambridge University, 1976-77; Assistant Professor, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 1977-80; Associate Professor, MIT, 1981-84; Professor, Harvard, 1985-2000, Louis Berkman Professor of Economics, Harvard, 1997-2000; Albert O. Hirschman Professor, Institute for Advanced Study, 2000-; Visiting Lecturer, Princeton University, 2000-; Editor, Quarterly Journal of Economics, 1984-1990; Editor, Economics Letters 1992-; Director, Summer School in Economic Theory, Hebrew University of Jerusalem, 2008-; President-elect, Game Theory Society, 2008-2010, Guggenheim Fellow, 1981; Sloan Foundation Fellow, 1983-85; Fellow, American Academy of Arts and Sciences; Fellow, Econometric Society (President, 2003); Member, National Academy of Sciences; Corresponding Fellow, British Academy; Honorary Fellow, St John’s College, Cambridge; Kempe Award in Environmental Economics, 2007; Honorary Professor, Wuhan, Tsinghua, and Shenzhen Universities; Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences, 2007; Doctor of Humane Letters, Bard College, 2008; Doctor honoris causa, Corvinus University of Budapest, 2008.

Steve Merrill

Stephen Merrill has been Executive Director of the National Academies’ Board on Science, Technology, and Economic Policy (STEP) since its formation in 1991. With the sponsorship of numerous federal government agencies, foundations, multinational corporations, and international institutions, the STEP program has become an important discussion forum and authoritative voice on innovation, competitiveness, intellectual property, human resources, statistical, and research and development policies. At the same time Dr. Merrill has directed many STEP projects and publications, including A Patent System for the 21^st Century (2004), Innovation Inducement Prizes (2007), and Innovation in Global Industries (2008). For his work on patent reform he was named one of the 50 most influential people worldwide in the intellectual property field by Managing Intellectual Property magazine and earned the Academies’ 2005 Distinguished Service Award. Previously, Dr. Merrill was a Fellow in International Business at the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), where he specialized in technology trade issues. He served on various congressional staffs including the Commerce, Science, and Transportation Committee, where he organized the first congressional hearings on international competition in the semiconductor and biotechnology industries. Dr. Merrill holds degrees in political science from Columbia (B.A.), Oxford (M. Phil.), and Yale (M.A. and Ph.D.) Universities.

Ed Mierzwinski

Ed Mierzwinski has been a consumer advocate in the Washington DC-based Federation of state Public Interest Research Groups (U.S. PIRG) since 1989. State PIRGs are non-profit and non-partisan. He often testifies before both Congress and state legislatures and has authored or co-authored numerous major reports on a wide range of consumer issues from identity theft to bank fees to product safety. He comments on these and other important consumer issues in his blog: www.uspirg.org/consumer and is often quoted in the national press. He is a 2003 recipient of Privacy International’s “Brandeis Award” for privacy protection efforts and a 2006 recipient of the Consumer Federation of America’s “Esther Peterson Consumer Service Award.”

He is a founding member of the Trans Atlantic Consumer Dialogue (www.tacd.org); from 1993-95, he served on the Federal Reserve Board痴 Consumer Advisory Council and he is a past member of the boards of two large consumer-owned cooperative businesses, Northeast Co-ops, a food wholesaler, and the University of Connecticut Bookstore Co-op. From 1981 through 1988, he was Executive Director of Connecticut PIRG. He is a graduate of the University of Connecticut (BA, MS).

His policy recommendations for the U.S. Government or the European Communities over the next four years:

Establish a medical innovation prize fund.

Strengthen enforcement against anti-competitive prescription drug mfg practices.

Allocate signifcant funding to development of better markets open source educational resources (OER).

Sisule F. Musungu

Mr. Musungu, a Kenyan national, is a co-founder and the President of IQsensato, a Geneva-based development research and policy think tank. Mr Musungu has affiliations and/or holds a range of other positions, among others: Chairman, Board of Directors, Health Action International (HAI) Africa; Member, Advisory Board, 3D – Trade, Human Rights and Equitable Economy; and is a Co-Founder and Joint Editor, Africa International Trade Review, a trade law and economics journal.

Previously, he worked he worked as an Associate Research Scholar and Senior Samuelson Fellow in the Information Society Project (ISP) at Yale Law School, as the Coordinator of the Innovation and Access to Knowledge Programme at the South Centre in Geneva and at the law firm Hamilton, Harrison and Mathews in Kenya. He has also consulted for, and/or acted as an advisor, to various UN agencies and international organisations, non-governmental organisations (NGOs), funding agencies and national governments. Mr. Musungu holds law degrees from the University of Nairobi and the University of Pretoria.

His policy recommendations for the U.S. Government or the European Communities over the next four years:

The two administrations should seize the various opportunities/platforms to do good that have been created after many years of hard work at the international level to promote balanced and opportunity enhancing patent, copyright and access to knowledge policies. There are opportunities to do good on patents based on the WHO Global Strategy on Essential Health Research and the new WIPO work prgramme on patents; on copyright based on the new WIPO programme for the Committee on Copyright and Related Rights (SCCR) which focus on exceptions and limitations especially for the visually impaired; and on access to knowledge based on new thinking on the supply of public goods under the WTO trade framework.

More on Sisule Musungu’s blog: http://thoughtsincolours.blogspot.com.

Maria A. Pallante

Maria Pallante is the newly appointed Associate Register for Policy and International Affairs, U.S. Copyright Office. She has worked for the Copyright Office previously: as Deputy General Counsel from January 2007 to Dec 2008, and as a senior policy advisor in the Office she now heads, from 1996 to 1997.

From 1999 -2006, Pallante served as the chief intellectual property counsel for the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation and the worldwide Guggenheim Museums, where she was responsible for the auditing, enforcement and licensing of intellectual property assets.

She has also been a staff attorney with the Authors Guild; Executive Director of the National Writers Union, and a member of the DC law firm and literary agency Lichtman, Trister, Singer & Ross. She holds a Juris Doctor degree from George Washington University Law School.

Guilherme Patriota

Guilherme de Aguiar Patriota is a career diplomat with the Brazilian Ministry of External Relations since 1984. He has specialized in intellectual property issues as a negotiator for Brazil in WIPO and at the WTO during the Uruguay and Doha Rounds of trade negotiations. Patriota took active part in moving forward the WIPO Development Agenda, the biodiversity disclosure proposal at the WTO, and contributed to the WHO agreement on the Strategy and Plan of Action for Public Health, Innovation and Intellectual Property Rights. He is currently posted at the Permanent Mission of Brazil to the UN in New York.

His policy recommendations for the U.S. Government or the European Communities over the next four years:

Promote impact studies on a technology sector by sector basis to assess pace and usefulness of innovation under IPR protection in social, economic and scientific terms. This could be the basis of a much needed review of the IPR social contract involving government, rights holders and society at large. Term of protection and strength of monopoly should be commensurate with the social welfare generated by protected subject matter; not determined by some “one size fits all” legal abstraction, loosely based (because not empirically determined) on industries self-assertions regarding the magnitude of their investments in innovation or on their own assessments of the monopoly-time needed to recoup those investments with a profit. Different time-frames and forms of protection should apply to different sectors of technology because they differ in many respects: industrial, investment, innovation and market cycles are different. Different reward systems should be considered and developed, including advanced purchasing commitments or prize systems. Publicly funded research and development should be discounted from alleged investment costs incurred or protected as a public good.

Negotiate better international provisions on exceptions and limitations to protection, or simply define enforceable user’s rights, and introduce into binding international treaties safeguards against unjustifiable encroachment by IPRs of subject matter in the public domain – a “Public Good Protection Measure”, or an inverted TPM of sorts. A global carve-out for access to knowledge would be a step in this direction, as would an exceptions and limitations agreement for the blind, as well a myriad of initiatives of this kind contained in the agreed WIPO Development Agenda and in the consensus WHO Resolution on Innovation, Public Health and Intellectual Property.

Consider a legally functional definition of innovation, a term that is always used in the abstract, while meaning different things to different people. What exists, in patents, are substantive patentability requirements, applied and enforced differently in different jurisdictions. In some cases, including in technologically advanced countries, they can be very lax requirements in their application in practice, generating an excess of IPRs, which will degrade the inherent quality of what is being protected and create negative spin-offs in societal and economic terms, such as litigation as a defensive or offensive market practice unrelated to new and useful technological offerings; in other situations, usually in developing countries without effective patent examination capabilities, they can become hard to meet standards, making it very difficult for local inventive activity to access and benefit from the IPR system. As it is extremely difficult to evaluate the value of protected subject matter in the abstract, the current trend in patent proliferation and its misuse as a financial product can lead to a bubble IP economy in many ways similar to the one that has generated the current global financial crisis.

William Patry

William Patry is Senior Copyright Counsel at Google Inc. He was formerly copyright counsel to the U.S. House of Representatives, Committee on the Judiciary, and a Policy Planning Advisor to the Register of Copyrights. He is the author of numerous books on copyright, including an 8 volume, 6,000 page treatise, “Patry on Copyright” (Thomson/West), as well as two forthcoming books, “Metaphors, Moral Panics, and Folk Devils in the Copyright Wars” (Oxford University Press, summer 2009), and “Patry on Fair Use” (Thomson/West, April 2009).

See more on: http://williampatry.blogspot.com.

Bruce Perens

http://perens.com

His policy recommendations for the U.S. Government or the European Communities over the next four years:

Network neutrality is important because the net will be the main vehicle of democratic discourse.
A balance in intellectual property law is necessary. So far, only the property-holding side is considered, and that has resulted in an imbalance toward their interests and draconian law.

Facilitating sincere representation of interest groups is important, since NGOs take such an active part in policy-making. Many existing NGOs represent different interests than they claim, and many constituencies are under-represented because they don’t have the deep pockets to form an effective lobby.

Let’s start with network neutrality. Voters base their vote on what the information they receive. Thus, bias in the media can tremendously influence the outcome of an election. Of interest is the evolution of mass communications as a vehicle for democratic discourse, and the influence on the vote of the various media:

Before Gutenberg, mass democracy was not possible because there was no mass communication. Political handbills had to be duplicated by hand by a copyist. Only the rich and the church could afford to employ copyists, and thus they could enforce their view upon others through their monopoly on written information. Literacy was not widespread.

With the advent of movable type, the common man gained the ability to create and distribute political handbills and to report news. This enabled the widespread political discourse that makes mass democracy possible. The press was the initiating tool of mass democracy.

Radio, and later, television broadcasting brought culture and events into the living-room, culminating in broadcast coverage of the Apollo 11 moon landing. Democracy was both enhanced and hindered. It was enhanced because the common man could now be a witness to events more directly through television, and hindered because the broadcast frequencies were a scarce medium that eventually came to be dominated by the rich, who distorted television coverage to promote their own political interest. Thus, this era was at the same time an advance and a setback for democracy.

The internet era brought a chance to escape the problems of limited frequency spectrum and ownership of the media by the rich. For a while, the common man was able to operate a “broadcast station” and compete with the wealthy media conglomerates. But this era may be ending as network operators reject network neutrality and implement “tiered” service. On a tiered network, requests for independent content may be redirected to the network provider’s own outlets. Content providers that do not pay the network provider will be carried with less speed or not carried at all.

Thus, I feel that network neutrality is vitally important to democracy. Without it, voters will have less access to independent opinions and those that conflict with the opinion of the network provider.

Intellectual property law is an important issue. The main problem here is that the agenda of only one side, the largest content-creating entities, is being received by politicians. Thus we’ve seen a relentless global expansion of intellectual property restriction. I think we should highlight in our message the statements made by our various proponents for a change to greater balance in intellectual property law.

Facilitating sincere representation of interest groups is an important issue. NGOs take a strong role in creating policy today, and concerning industrial NGOs, for example, they tend to be have their agenda set by vendors rather than their customers, and by the largest of those vendors rather than a representative sample. CompTIA is one example of this. They have lobbied extensively against rules that would allow Open Source could compete fairly with proprietary software in a legal framework that was designed before the advent of Open Source and thus has a strong proprietary bias. IMO CompTIA’s agenda favors the interests of a few large vendors over their other membership and the users of their membership’s products.

In the IT industry, we had a setback in the 1980’s when the IRS changed the 501(c)3 rules so that the users of a specific product would no longer be granted the tax-exempt non-profit organization status. So, if you want to have a strong organization representing iPhone users, exclusively, it’s going to be at an economic disadvantage.

Professor Arti Rai

Arti Rai is an expert in patent law, law and the biopharmaceutical industry, and health care regulation. Her current research, funded by the NIH, focuses on intellectual property issues raised by collaborative R&D in areas ranging from synthetic biology to drug development. Her recent publications include “Who’s Afraid of the APA? What the Patent System Can Learn from Administrative Law” 95 Georgetown Law Journal269 (2007) (with Stuart Benjamin); “Open and Collaborative Research: A New Model for Biomedicine,” in Intellectual Property Rights in Frontier Industries: Biotech and Software (AEI-Brookings Press, 2005); “Finding Cures for Tropical Diseases: Is Open Source an Answer?” Public Library of Science: Medicine (2004) (with Stephen M. Maurer and Andrej Sali); “Collective Action and Proprietary Rights: The Case of Biotechnology Research with Low Commercial Value,” in International Public Goods and Transfer of Technology under a Globalized Intellectual Property Regime (Cambridge Univ. Press, 2005); and “Engaging Facts and Policy: A Multi-Institutional Approach to Patent System Reform,” 106 Columbia Law Review (2003).

Professor Rai joined the Duke Law faculty in 2003. In the winter of 2007, Rai was the Hieken Visiting Professor in Patent Law at Harvard Law School. In the fall of 2004, Rai was a Visiting Professor at Yale Law School. Prior to joining Duke, she was on the faculty of the University of Pennsylvania Law School, where she was also a visiting professor in Fall 2000. From 1997-2001, she was a faculty member at the University of San Diego School of Law.

Rai graduated from Harvard College, magna cum laude, with a B.A. in biochemistry and history (history and science), attended Harvard Medical School for the 1987-1988 academic year, and received her J.D., cum laude, from Harvard Law School in 1991. While in law school, she served as executive editor for the Harvard Civil Rights-Civil Liberties Law Review.

Daniel B. Ravicher

Daniel B. Ravicher is Executive Director of the Public Patent Foundation (“PUBPAT”) at Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law, where he also serves as Lecturer in Law. Prior to founding PUBPAT, Mr. Ravicher was associated with the patent law practice groups of Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher & Flom LLP, Brobeck, Phleger & Harrison, LLP, and Patterson, Belknap, Webb & Tyler, LLP, all in New York, and served the Honorable Randall R. Rader, Circuit Judge for the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit in Washington, D.C. Mr. Ravicher is a registered patent attorney and he writes and speaks frequently on patent law, including testifying as an invited witness before Congress on the topic of patent reform. As a result of his accomplishments and professional reputation, IP Law & Business magazine included Mr. Ravicher on its ‘Top 50 Under 45′ list for 2008. Mr. Ravicher received his law degree from the University of Virginia School of Law, where he was the Franklin O’Blechman Scholar of his class, a Mortimer Caplin Public Service Award recipient and an Editor of the Virginia Journal of Law and Technology, and his bachelors degree in materials science magna cum laude with University Honors from the University of South Florida.

His policy recommendations for the U.S. Government or the European Communities over the next four years:

For a procedural perspective, all interests affected by the patent system should be fairly represented at each place of patent policy or decision making.  Listening to only the interests of patent holders and patent attorneys assures a result that is skewed in their favor to the disadvantage of the public.  Specifically, for one, this means inviting persons who represent the public interest to participate in patent policy discussions and deliberations.

Make patent quality the number one priority for the patent system. Part of achieving this goal would include eliminating the quota system placed on examiners which disincentivizes them from spending as much time as necessary on examination.  Another part would be to eliminate – or curtail – unlimited continuations and unlimited claiming.  A last part could also include a more robust and complete post-grant opposition system than the current reexamination options (or simply strengthening the current reexamination options).

Create a fair use exemption for patent infringement like there is for copyright and trademark.  For example, performing research and exercising civil liberties should both constitute fair uses of patents that are allowed by the law.

Judit Rius

Ms. Rius works in the Washington, DC office of KEI on access to medicines and access to knowledge issues. Her projects include providing technical assistance to developing countries on intellectual property law and encouraging the collective management of intellectual property rights in essential medical technologies with the creation of patent pools. Fluent in Spanish, English, Catalan and French. Ms. Rius is a contributing editor for Knowledge Ecology Studies, and serves in several NGO and publications advisory councils.

In addition to her position at KEI, Ms. Rius is Member of the Board of Directors of My Strands, an Internet company. Prior to her present position, Ms. Rius worked at the legal department of an international pharmaceutical company. She has also worked for an information technology consulting firm and for an intelligent software spin-off company of the Artificial Intelligence Research Institute, under the auspices of the Spanish Ministry of Science and Technology. Ms. Rius co-authored the curriculum for the postgraduate course on intellectual property and the legal implications of open source software at the Universitat Oberta de Catalunya. She has also worked for Intermon-Oxfam Spain, been a legal intern at Electronic Frontier Foundation and collaborated with the Stanford Center for Internet and Society.

Ms. Rius received a Licenciatura en Derecho (JD equivalent) and a Master’s Degree in International Studies from Pompeu Fabra University. In January 2006, she graduated from Stanford Law School with an LLM in Law, Science and Technology.

Her policy recommendations for the U.S. Government or the European Communities over the next four years:

The U.S. and E.U. governments should support a WHO biomedical R&D treaty as included in resolution WHA 61.21. The treaty should ensure sustainable finance for needs-driven R&D, and set global norms in other areas, such as access to government funded research through open access to scientific articles, basic research, technology and data.

The U.S. and E.U governments should promote R&D incentives that de-link the market for innovation from the market for the products., the cost of R&D from the price of the product. The resulting products should not be subject to monopoly supply, for example, through the use of prize funds linked to patent pools and open licensing of inventions.

The U.S. and the E.U. governments should support the proposal of the World Blind Union for a WIPO treaty for blind, visually impaired and other reading disabled persons and engage in norm setting on minimum copyright exceptions and limitations.

Professor Susan K. Sell

Susan K.Sell is Professor of Political Science and International Affairs and Director of the Institute for Global and International Affairs at the George Washington University. She has written three books (most recently, Intellectual Property: a Critical History, co-authored with Chris May) and numerous articles on the politics of intellectual property. She serves on the board of IP-Watch, a non-profit intellectual property reporting service based in Geneva.

Her policy recommendations for the U.S. Government or the European Communities over the next four years:

The US needs to engage in meaningful campaign finance reform. Until that happens it will be difficult to tip the political scales in favor of a more balanced approach to intellectual property policy.

The US should open up its deliberations on the enforcement agenda to all stakeholders whom it will affect.

USTR needs to seek reliable and objective data about losses due to intellectual property infractions abroad.

USPTO should be reformed to reduce the number of bad patents.

Sherwin Siy

Sherwin Siy is Staff Attorney and Director of the Global Knowledge Initiative at Public Knowledge, where he focuses on emerging copyright issues and international effects on IP and technology policy. Before joining PK, he served as Staff Counsel at the Electronic Privacy Information Center, working on consumer and communications issues. Sherwin received his JD, with a Certificate in Law and Technology, from UC Berkeley’s Boalt Hall School of Law.

Gigi Sohn

Gigi Sohn is an internationally known communications attorney. In September 2001, she founded Public Knowledge with Laurie Racine (then President of the Center for the Public Domain) and activist/author David Bollier.

Gigi serves as PK’s chief strategist, fundraiser and public face. She is frequently quoted in the New York Times, Washington Post and Wall Street Journal, as well as in trade and local press. Gigi has been published in the Washington Post, Variety, CNET and Legal Times. In addition, she has appeared on numerous television and radio programs, including the Today Show, The McNeil-Lehrer Report, C-SPAN’s Washington Journal and National Public Radio’s All Things Considered and Morning Edition.

Gigi is a Non-Resident Fellow at the University of Southern California Annenberg Center, and a Senior Fellow at the University of Melbourne Faculty of Law. She has been an Adjunct Professor at Georgetown University and at the Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law, Yeshiva University.

Gigi served as a Project Specialist in the Ford Foundation’s Media, Arts and Culture unit and as Executive Director of the Media Access Project, a public interest law firm that represents citizens’ rights before the FCC and the courts. In 1997, President Clinton appointed Gigi to serve as a member of his Advisory Committee on the Public Interest Obligations of Digital Television Broadcasters. In May 2006, the Electronic Frontier Foundation gave Gigi its Internet “Pioneer” Award.

Gigi currently serves on the board of the Telecommunications Policy Research Conference (TPRC) and Broadcasters’ Child Development Center (BCDC). She is a member of the advisory board of the Future of Music Coalition and the Center for Public Integrity’s “Well Connected” Telecommunications Project. Gigi served on the District of Columbia Bar Board of Governors from 1997-2000.

Gigi holds a B.S. in Broadcasting and Film, Summa Cum Laude, from the Boston University College of Communication and a J.D. from the University of Pennsylvania Law School.

Joseph E. Stiglitz

Joseph E. Stiglitz was born in Gary, Indiana in 1943. A graduate of Amherst College, he received his PHD from MIT in 1967, became a full professor at Yale in 1970, and in 1979 was awarded the John Bates Clark Award, given biennially by the American Economic Association to the economist under 40 who has made the most significant contribution to the field. He has taught at Princeton, Stanford, MIT and was the Drummond Professor and a fellow of All Souls College, Oxford. He is now University Professor at Columbia University in New York and Chair of Columbia University’s Committee on Global Thought. He is also the co-founder and Executive Director of the Initiative for Policy Dialogue at Columbia. In 2001, he was awarded the Nobel Prize in economics for his analyses of markets with asymmetric information, and he was a lead author of the 1995 Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which shared the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize.

Stiglitz was a member of the Council of Economic Advisers from 1993-95, during the Clinton administration, and served as CEA chairman from 1995-97. He then became Chief Economist and Senior Vice-President of the World Bank from 1997-2000. In 2008, he was appointed by French President Nicolas Sarkozy to chair a Commission on the Measurement of Economic Performance and Economic Progress.

Stiglitz holds a part-time appointment at the University of Manchester as Chair of the Management Board and Director of Graduate Summer Programs at the Brooks World Poverty Institute. He serves on numerous other boards, including Amherst College’s Board of Trustees and Resources for the Future.

Stiglitz helped create a new branch of economics, “The Economics of Information,” exploring the consequences of information asymmetries and pioneering such pivotal concepts as adverse selection and moral hazard, which have now become standard tools not only of theorists, but of policy analysts. He has made major contributions to macro-economics and monetary theory, to development economics and trade theory, to public and corporate finance, to the theories of industrial organization and rural organization, and to the theories of welfare economics and of income and wealth distribution. In the 1980s, he helped revive interest in the economics of R&D.

His work has helped explain the circumstances in which markets do not work well, and how selective government intervention can improve their performance.

Recognized around the world as a leading economic educator, he has written textbooks that have been translated into more than a dozen languages. He founded one of the leading economics journals, The Journal of Economic Perspectives. His book Globalization and Its Discontents (W.W. Norton June 2001) has been translated into 35 languages, besides at least two pirated editions, and in the non-pirated editions has sold more than one million copies worldwide. Other recent books include The Roaring Nineties (W.W. Norton), Towards a New Paradigm in Monetary Economics (Cambridge University Press) with Bruce Greenwald, Fair Trade for All (Oxford University Press), with Andrew Charlton, and Making Globalization Work, (WW Norton and Penguin/ Allen Lane, September 2006). His most recent book, The Three Trillion Dollar War: The True Cost of the Iraq Conflict, with Linda Bilmes of Harvard University, was published in March 2008 by WW Norton and Penguin/ Allen Lane.