The free flow of ideas and information is the wellspring of an open society. Democracy is rooted in the informed consent of the governed. Likewise, economic innovation, creative expression, and cultural production increasingly depend on the ability to adapt, transform, and build upon the ideas of others. Yet over the past 30 years, the regime of intellectual property law and copyright has slowly but steadily constricted the free flow of information to the point where free expression and innovation are imperiled as never before.

Copyright, as legal protection for creators of original works, was designed to have a time limit so that knowledge and innovation in arts and sciences would become part of the public domain.  As business interests have increased the length of copyright, the public domain has been weakened, restricting access to the common heritage of human innovation and historical memory.  Culture is at stake, as well as access to scientific knowledge that creates medicine, protects biodiversity, and provides other resources for the public good.  How can we protect both the public domain and the livelihood of creators?

Despite the fact that intellectual property rights are pervasive in arts, culture, and media fields, the underlying policy issues are often not on the radar screen of the nonprofit sector nor those of us who fund the nonprofit sector.

Margaret Wilkerson, The Ford Foundation

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The content of this page was extracted from a funder briefing entitled "Securing Our Rights to Public Knowledge, Creativity, and Freedom of Expression," hosted by the Ford Foundation, organized by Grantmakers in Film and Electronic Media's Working Group on Media Policy and co-sponsored by the Funders Network on Trade and Globalization, Grantmakers in the Arts, and the New York Regional Association of Grantmakers  The content was adapted from a report written by Neil F. Carlson.

DOWNLOAD the complete summary report or the complete transcripts of the convening.

CONTENTS   1. Introduction   2. Special Feature: Lawrence Lessig Video   3. Media & Cultural Policy   4. Copyright Clearance   5. Technology Liberates, Copyright Incarcerates   6. Illegal Art   7. Knowledge Held Hostage   8. Individual Rights and Freedom of Expression   9. Creating a Constituency for Reform 10. Balancing the Scale 11. Access and Livelihood 12. The Logic of the Bazaar 13. Conclusion 14. Bios of Participants

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Introduction
The Expansion of Intellectual Property Rights Consider:  

·       Due to the exorbitant cost of re-licensing the archival footage, music, and photographs that appear in Eyes on the Prize, Henry Hampton's seminal documentary film series on the history of the civil rights movement is no longer available in stores and can't be shown on television or released on DVD.

·       Over the past few years, the satellite TV company Direct TV sent over 170,000 letters threatening legal action against people who had bought "smartcards," a technology that secures computer networks and enables user-based identification - but which can also be used to pirate Direct TV signals. The letters threatened to sue smartcard buyers unless they settled for $3,500, even though Direct TV had no proof that the recipients were actually pirating the signal. For Direct TV lawyers, possession of technology was proof enough of guilt.  

·       An online journal of media and politics wants to discuss an interview between Tom Brokaw and President Bush - only the interview is copyrighted by NBC so it can't be posted online without costly copyright clearance.

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Special Feature: Lawrence Lessig Video
Intellectual Property & the Creative Commons

Eminent legal scholar Lawrence Lessig is widely known as the guru of intellectual property law.  He is the founder of Creative Commons, a nonprofit organization that has developed a legal alternative to traditional copyright, which offers "a flexible range of protections and freedoms" designed to support both the livlihoods of creators and a vibrant public domain.  Creative Commons is now used in dozens of countries. In this four-part video Lessig also discusses Science Commons and other projects.

DOWNLOAD the complete transcript of Lawrence Lessig.

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Media & Cultural Policy
Protecting & Expanding Rights to Free Expression, Knowledge & Creativity

Bill Ivey, former chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts under the Clinton administration and currently director of the Curb Center for Art, Enterprise, and Public Policy at Vanderbilt University, lays out a stark assessment.

He describes cultural policy in the United States as hopelessly incoherent. Legislative and regulatory authority over media ownership, copyright, patents, and intellectual property are scattered among scores of federal agencies and Congressional committees - from the FCC to the Judiciary and Commerce committees - few of which have any cultural mandate. In the past 25 years, he notes, the term of copyright was extended 25 years, the Digital Millennium Copyright Act criminalized file sharing, and ownership restrictions on commercial media were lifted, leading to massive consolidation in broadcasting, radio, and television. "For at least the past decade, cultural policy has often been little more than what I would call roadkill along the highway to economically efficient, minimally regulated cultural industries," he says.

"Intellectual property as we live it today is really a product of the 20th century," Ivey says. "It's not about individual creators but rather about government-protected revenue streams attached to the exploitation of intangible corporate assets." Moreover, these attempts to maximize revenue have profound implications for creativity, freedom, and expression. "It's these attempts to maximize IP revenue streams that often limit risk, restrict content, constrain creativity, and impose de facto censorship, undermining freedom and the public purpose."

Here's just one example: In 1974, Ivey was helping to produce a series of 100 albums of American music for New World Records, a nonprofit record company. The plan was to give free albums to public radio stations and public libraries in celebration of the 1976 bicentennial. Ivey hoped to get historical tracks for free - no mechanical payments to publishers, no license fees to record labels - as part of a national heritage project. And it proved an impossible task. RCA refused to grant a license for Elvis Presley songs; likewise for Loretta Lynn's label. So Ivey was forced to create an overview of America's musical heritage without two of its leading figures. The result, he says, was "America's cultural heritage viewed through the gap-toothed smirk of intellectual property protection."

Grantmakers have  played a significant role in supporting culture, but Ivey believes that a new strategy is now needed:

"I argue that it is time we declared the matching grant and the expansion of the nonprofit arts sector a success, but [it is] also time to move on to a fresh definition of media, expressive life, and the cultural sector, a definition that enables those of us who care about equity, quality of life, access, diversity, freedom, culture, community, and the public interest, to craft new intervention models that will let us engage directly the government and private sector actors who manipulate the gates and channels of communication and art."

Ivey is optimistic that intellectual property rights do not fall into neat partisan or ideological frameworks that are either Democratic or Republican, but he also is concerned that the window of opportunity is narrow.  Advocates need to work directly with for-profit cultural industries and with legislators and regulators before corporate interests solidify cultural policy and copyright for the 21st century.  "The digital revolution is still transforming arts and communication systems, meaning that the policy framework is still pliable."

Grantmakers, artists, and advocates have an opportunity to "rethink our definition of culture and re-imagine our grantmaking strategy in order to nurture expression, secure open communication, and protect our freedoms.

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Copyright Clearance
The Filmmaker's Bottleneck

Copyright clearance has cast a long shadow of irony over Jeffrey Tuchman and his career as a documentary filmmaker. Thanks to relatively cheap digital technology, Tuchman now owns his means of production. With a digital camera and editing software, he can shoot and edit a film on a shoestring budget. Distribution is easier, too. When Tuchman started making documentaries 25 years ago, PBS was his sole venue. Now, distribution channels are everywhere: DVDs, cable networks, Netflix, and the Internet. "Not only is it easier for me to make what I want to make, it's easier for me to find someone who will get out what I make," he says.

And yet it is in many ways harder to make a film today than it was 25 years ago. "There's this bottleneck," Tuchman says. "And that bottleneck is copyrights." When Tuchman started working, copyright clearance for archival material - film clips, still photos, music - represented about 5% of his costs. Today they are 25% to 50%. What's more, because each copyright must be negotiated independently, the final product is governed by the lowest rights term. "It's like Mission Impossible: This tape will self-destruct in seven years."

And while Tuchman personally might choose to use some of the film clips under the fair use copyright exemption, most television entities would never go for it.  Tuchman explains that a lot of historical film footage should be in the public domain,  "except that some corporate archive has decided that it owns the rights to it." And so it may be that because some corporation claims ownership of the rights to images that are considered by many artists and scholars to be part of the historical record, the public may never get access.

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Technology Liberates, Copyright Incarcerates
Copyright and Musical Freedom

Thanks to digital technologies, the cost of owning a recording studio has fallen fifty-fold, from $100,000 in 1974 to about $2,000 today. Simply put, digital technology has revolutionized the production and distribution of music over the past 30 years.  

Yet at the very time when technology has made possible the proliferation of musical voices, expanding copyright restrictions are choking them off, according to Rick Karr, a musician, producer, writer, and host of TechnoPop, a documentary film and book project.  This is particularly true for hip-hop music, which uses samples of other recordings and then remixes them into new, original works.  

"Hip-hop is folk music writ large for the electronic age," Karr explains.  It has made its way into the favelas of Brazil and the kampungs of Indonesia, where musicians and deejays sample songs and talk to each other in music. "If this form of expression gets choked off, we have lost something important," he continues. "Music is the canary in the coal mine. It was the first form of cultural expression that technology set free." And it is the ground upon which struggle over ideas, expression, and freedom elsewhere - in film and the written word - is being fought.

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Illegal Art
Artists Pushing the Boundaries of Fair Use

As the curator of Illegal Art, a Web site and traveling exhibit, Carrie McLaren has made a career of pushing the boundaries of intellectual property law and interrogating the meaning of fair use.  Take for example, three sketches by Canadian artist Diana Thorneycroft. The first showed Mickey Mouse, head agog, with a noose around his neck; the second, Goofy with his hands bound in front of him; the third, Barney Rubble supine in a pool of blood. Was this willful copyright infringement or a commentary on the relationship between cartoon violence and real violence? Thorneycroft could not have made her cultural commentary without using pop culture icons - and yet her gallery, fearing a lawsuit, refused to show her work.  To what extent are cultural icons such as Mickey Mouse the sole property of a corporation versus an image that is part of an artist's memory and personal history?

Fair use is a legal doctrine that allows copyrighted works to be used without restriction when they are in an educational or noncommercial context.  But the doctrine is vague, and the work of artists as educational or edifying can be difficult to prove in a court of law.   McLaren believes fair use is something that needs to be tested.  "There's no law that says a documentary filmmaker has to clear every single clip that's in their film. But clearing every clip has become the habit in the industry, the habit in television. If we get out of the habit of recognizing fair use then we're in serious danger."

  

 

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Knowledge Held Hostage
How Copyright Law Has Narrowed Intellectual Inquiry

A few years ago, Joseph Turow, a professor at the University of Pennsylvania's Annenberg School for Communication, was working with the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation to produce a CD-ROM for first-year medical students about how television medical dramas influence the practice of real-world medicine. Though it was for nonprofit, noncommercial use, the licensing fees were astronomical. The several minutes of footage Turow licensed cost $17,500, including $6,000 for a few minutes of a 1962 Ben Casey episode. "Negotiating this was a riot," Turow recalled. "When I talked to the guy at Viacom and told him this is free, this is academic, this is going to be given for free to medical students, and foundations are supporting it, he said, 'I don't care. The academic market may be our next big market.'"

Other examples verged on the absurd. A university refuses to accept a Ph.D. thesis with music attached to it because the music didn't have copyright clearance. A dance troupe at the University of Texas dances in silence because the dancers couldn't find the copyright holders of the music they wanted to accompany the piece.

The world of ideas is tethered to the media. "You can't talk about ideas today without talking about television, radio, music, and interviews that show up in this media," Turow says. The problem is that people are scared. "Robert Wood Johnson did not want to go the route of fair use with me. They said, pay the money.  Most academics can't afford to pay, and that's why I'm very concerned with the future of academic scholarship."

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Individual Rights & Freedom of Expression

Reframing Public Debate on Copyright & Intellectual Property  

One of the biggest challenges for public interest advocates is how to frame the issue of intellectual property rights so that it is both compelling and relevant to the things that people care about.  John Russonello, from the research and communications firm Belden, Russonello & Stewart, is working to identify relationships between issues and action from the perspective of people's core values.  In respect to intellectual property rights and copyright, Russonello has found that values such as responsibility, honesty, and fairness play a large role in how the issue is perceived.  He cautions, "You can't change people's values.  Don't try.  Just try and understand their values, respect them, and look for commonality."

Russonello has determined, based on a series of focus groups, that advocates of restricted digital rights have a huge head start in winning support.  "Their message is easy to convey," Russonello said, referring to the controversy over file sharing on the Internet.  "It's wrong to steal.  That's as old as Moses."

Russonello says that there's a lot of confusion about the constitutional legality of sharing books, music, information, and other forms of knowledge, and that these rights need to be communicated.  He tells a striking story about what he learned in focus groups with teachers and librarians:

"I said, 'What's the one thing you need to teach your kids about the copyright laws?' They said, 'We need a scared straight program for kids.  Like we scared them out of drugs, we need to scare them against using the Internet.'  And then I lay our message on them.  I said, "What if, in fact, I told you that that's not really the law?"  And I gave them the message that the constitution defends our freedom to read, etc., etc.  They said, 'Wow, I didn't know that.' These are teachers and librarians.  'We didn't know that.  We would love to give this message to our students, but we didn't know this was the case.'  As long as that's the public opinion the other side will continue to be bold in its lawsuits and every other way."

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Creating a Constituency for Reform
Legislative & Regulatory Tactics

According to Gigi Sohn, the founder of Public Knowledge, a public interest advocacy group working to fortify and defend "a vibrant information commons," the "culture industries" - Hollywood, the recording industries, and large publishers - are actively working to strengthen copyright law on several fronts.  On one hand they are seeking government-mandated copy protection on consumer technologies such as MP3 and DVD players.  They are also pursuing legislative and regulatory mechanisms that could increase penalties for using peer-to-peer networks, or eliminate online privacy protection.  "It's all about the control of the means of distribution," Sohn says.  "And it's all about control of content."

Despite a relatively small group of supporters for digital rights - what Sohn calls "100,000 angry geeks" -- she is hopeful about the future of digital rights and the information commons.  She believes an aggressive communications strategy is essential for building a constituency that can use the media effectively to quickly respond to and influence pending legislation.  "You have to have daily contact with the press," says Sohn, who has launched many successful media campaigns around intellectual property and public domain issues. 

The long-term challenge is to build a larger coalition for reform that cuts across party lines.  "This is not a Republican-Democrat issue; this is not an all-bad corporations on one side and nobody on the other," Sohn points out.  Consumer electronics companies don't want restrictions imposed on their products, and likewise, many Republicans are squeamish about policies that restrict consumer and civil liberties.

Sohn's strategy is to build coalitions, have aggressive communications, and develop straightforward grassroots campaigns to which people can relate.   She cites a campaign called "Save the iPod," which took one of the most popular electronic devices as a symbol of what's at stake if copyright law is expanded.  "If you have a simple message that says to people you're going to lose something," says Sohn,  "that's very powerful."

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Balancing the Scale
Legal Challenges to Copyright Encroachment

Shari Steele, the executive director of the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), operates on the motto that "being able to share ideas and information is the reason the Web was created in the first place."  With that in mind, EFF has been a leading force in many legal battles to protect digital rights.  EFF uses legal analysis, threat of litigation, and high-impact litigation against large corporations that often use excessive interpretations of copyright to intimidate and restrict artists, musicians, and ordinary citizens.  EFF has had a lot of success in upholding fair use standards against illegal abuse of copyright.

Here's one example:  In the fall of 2003, Diebold, Inc., a manufacturer of electronic voting machines, sent out cease-and-desist letters to a pair of Swarthmore College students and their Internet service providers, after the students published e-mails and snippets of an online discussion in which Diebold employees candidly discussed flaws in their electronic voting systems. The company claimed that the internal documents contained copyrighted material - and that publishing them violated the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA). Citing fair use, EFF eventually got Diebold to back down - but then took the additional step of suing the company for deliberately making a false claim of copyright infringement, which was itself a violation of DMCA. Deluged by bad press, Diebold quietly settled the case. "This was the first successful use of this particular section of the DMCA, so it was a big precedent," Steele said.

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Access and Livelihood
Reforming Global Intellectual Property Law

James Love, director of the Consumer Project on Technology, tracks how the United States uses international bodies such as the World Trade Organization (WTO) and the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) to pressure developing countries to adopt intellectual property laws based on the American model, which is driven by corporate interests. 

"The problem here is that rock-and-roll is driving policy," Love said. But intellectual property and copyright have a huge impact on access to books, scientific information, medicine, internal corporate documents, and government information, all of which are essential to education, health, and welfare.  On a global level, these issues get caught up in the debate over file sharing. "How do you remind people that there is a lot of collateral damage outside of the music area?" asks Love.   One lesson he learned by working with Doctors Without Borders is that the message needs to come across clearly that access to medicine, like access to science and other forms of knowledge, is a necessity for developing countries. 

Still, Love recognizes that there is also the necessity to protect the livelihood, R&D, and the economic incentive that creates innovation.  It's a challenge reformers of intellectual property rights are facing in order to find pragmatic solutions.  Along with open access come new economic models that can serve the needs of developing countries, provide fair compensation to innovators and producers, but put a check on unfair corporate practices that have favored profit over access.

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The Logic of the Bazaar
Intellectual Property & Global Civil Society

Christophe Aguiton has been at the forefront of technological innovation using open source software, as a developer for France Télécom, the French equivalent of Bell Labs, where cutting-edge technologies have been created. As an activist in what he described as the "global justice movement," Aguiton believes technology can help create a more just, equitable, and sustainable world. The "free software" movement, as open source is also called, is based on the idea that software developers release not only the finished product - a database program, a Web browser, an operating system - but also the underlying code that created it. Using what is known as a general public license, anyone may use, improve, or transform the code, so long as the "new" product remains in the public domain as well.  Open source means more access, fewer bugs and viruses, and an ongoing creative development process that fosters innovation for the public good.

Aguiton likens open source software to "the logic of the bazaar more than the cathedral." In the cathedral model, power and authority are centralized, but the bazaar works according to "the logic of small projects." No one owns the bazaar, but there you will find the cobbler, the fishmonger, the fruit vendor - all of whom collectively serve the greater good. "And that really changes the rules," Aguiton said. "If you look at the free software itself - Linux [an operating system] or Firefox [a Web browser], or whatever - they are now the main competitors for big corporations like Microsoft." With better product delivered at zero cost, the economics of open source software shift to services and support. 

Connecting social justice with open source technology and sustainable economies is part of a greater vision for Aguiton.

"I think to come back to this idea of the vision we can have, the extension of the public domain, or the extension of the common good, that's the key issue.  And it's a key issue obviously in basic things like water, livelihood, and also in communication.  The fact now to have broadband with wireless and Wi-Fi will be the basic things for all of us.  And culture is part of our life.  And to have something more and more common and more and more public, instead of more and more private and more and more corporate, I think that is our vision mainly."

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Conclusion
Toward a Vision of Public Knowledge, Creativity & Free Expression

What will become of the information commons that constitute our shared cultural, artistic, and intellectual heritage if knowledge becomes more restricted, shrinking the public domain?  If pharmaceutical companies don't have to publish their private drug studies, how can other scientists verify efficacy, not to mention build on their knowledge?  If broadcast flags on digital television signals prohibit citizens from copying and re-broadcasting committee hearings or congressional debates, how can we have an informed debate on crucial public issues?  What will become of cultural and political commentary, satire, and historical memory if artists and filmmakers are too timid to exercise their rights to fair use?

The stakes are high. After all, where would rock and roll be without the blues musicians who came before it? The Beat poets without Walt Whitman? Cubism without the influence of African art? Disney films without Mother Goose? These expressions all drew on the rich wellspring of ideas in the public domain. Unless we regain the balance between licenses, copyrights, patents, and the public domain, we run the risk of stifling economic innovation, scientific progress, artistic expression - and perhaps even the practice of democracy itself.

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Bios of Participants

Christophe Aguiton (Paris, France) is a researcher and developer for France Télécom, specializing in "innovations ascendantes" (bottom up innovations), free software, blogs, and the emergence of networks. Aguiton is a founder of the union Solidaires Unitaires Democratiques, which emerged from France Télécom, the Syndicat National de Chemin de Fer and other communication unions within the Confederation Francaise Democratique du Travail.  A founder of the anti-unemployment movement AC! and of the Association for the Taxation of Financial Transactions for the Aid of Citizens, Aguiton is also a member of the International Council of the World Social Forum and has helped guide the Forum's work since its inception in 2001. Aguiton is co-founder of Babels (http://www.babels.org), a network of volunteer interpreters that has emerged out of the World Social Forum process, and of Nomad, an international network of people committed to putting essential communication technologies into the public domain.   

Alison R. Bernstein (New York, NY) was appointed the Ford Foundation's (http://www.fordfound.org) vice president for the Knowledge, Creativity, and Freedom Program (KC&F) in 1996.  She joined the Foundation in 1982 as a program officer and subsequently served as director of the Education and Culture Program from 1992 to1996. A former associate dean of faculty at Princeton University, Bernstein is the author of American Indians and World War II: Towards a New Era in Indian Affairs (University of Oklahoma Press, 1991; paperback, 1999); with Virginia B. Smith, The Impersonal Campus (Jossey-Bass, 1979), and, with Jacklyn Cock, Melting Pots and Rainbow Nations: Conversations on Difference in the U.S. and South Africa (University of Illinois Press, 2002). Bernstein has published articles in the Teachers College Record, Signs: A Journal on Women and Culture, The Chronicle of Higher Education, and Tikkun on issues related to students' transfer from community colleges to four-year institutions, access to higher education for women and minorities, diversity on campus, and the impact of women's studies. She was also an executive editor of Change magazine and currently serves on the board of advisors of the National Museum of American History, Smithsonian Institution, and as a Presidential Advisory Board member on Tribal Colleges and Universities. Bernstein graduated from Vassar College and received an M.A. and a Ph.D. in history from Columbia University.


David Bollier (Amherst, MA) is an independent strategist, journalist, and consultant with a varied public-interest portfolio (http://www.bollier.org). Much of his work revolves around progressive public policy, digital media, and the commons. Bollier is co-founder and board member of Public Knowledge, a public-interest advocacy organization that represents the public's stake in copyright, digital technology, and Internet issues. He is a senior fellow at the Norman Lear Center at the USC Annenberg Center for Communication, where he heads the Creativity, Commerce & Culture project, and a fellow at the Tomales Bay Institute, a think tank devoted to the commons. Much of Bollier's recent work has been focused on developing a new analysis and language for reclaiming the commons, a project that began with his 2003 book, Silent Theft: The Private Plunder of Our Common Wealth (Routledge). He has written a number of essays and reports about the commons and recently launched an Internet portal, On the Commons (http://www.onthecommons.org), hosted by the Tomales Bay Institute. Bollier is the author of a forthcoming book, Brand-Name Bullies and Their Quest to Own and Control Culture (John Wiley & Sons), a collection of stories about outrageous extensions of intellectual property law.  

David Haas (Philadelphia, PA) is chair of the steering committee of Grantmakers in Film and Electronic Media (www.gfem.org), an association of grantmakers committed to advancing the field of media arts and public-interest media funding, and which serves as home for the Working Group on Media Policy.  In addition, Haas serves as board chair of the William Penn Foundation, a regional grantmaker focusing on the greater Philadelphia area, and as a trustee of the Phoebe Haas Charitable Trust "B," which supports a range of 501(c)3 charitable organizations, including media projects.  From 1989 to 1997, Haas worked as coordinator of the Philadelphia Independent Film/Video Association (PIFVA), a service organization for independent film-, video, and audio makers based in the greater Philadelphia area.

Bill Ivey (Nashville, TN) is the director of the Curb Center for Art, Enterprise, and Public Policy at Vanderbilt University (http://www.vanderbilt.edu/curbcenter), an arts policy research center with offices in Nashville, Tennessee, and Washington, D.C., as well as the director of the Center's Arts Industries Policy Forum. Ivey also serves as facilitator for Leadership Music, a music industry professional development program, and chairs the board of the National Recording Preservation Foundation, a federally chartered foundation affiliated with the Library of Congress. From May 1998 through September 2001, Ivey served in the Clinton-Gore administration as the seventh chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts, a federal cultural agency. Prior to government service, Ivey was director of the Country Music Foundation in Nashville, Tennessee. Ivey was twice elected board chairman of the National Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences. He holds degrees in history, folklore, and ethnomusicology, as well as honorary doctorates from the University of Michigan, Michigan Technological University, Wayne State University, and Indiana University. Ivey is a four-time Grammy Award nominee (Best Album Notes category) and is the author of numerous articles on cultural policy, folk, and popular music.

Rick Karr (Brooklyn, NY) is writer and host of Technopop: How Technology Makes and Un-Makes Popular Music, a forthcoming television documentary series and book project (http://www.technopop.org). He has been a cultural correspondent with National Public Radio News since 1999.  Karr is an adjunct professor at the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism, and he began writing TechnoPop as a book-length history during a 2004 residency at the MacDowell Colony in Peterborough, NH. Over the past five years, Karr has been reporting on culture and technology for NPR from New York and working as a correspondent to the PBS show NOW with Bill Moyers. In 1998 and 1999, he hosted the NPR music and culture magazine show "Anthem." Prior to that, he was a general assignment reporter at NPR's Chicago bureau. Karr has written about culture, technology, and pop music for New Musical Express, Sounds, and Stereo Review. He is a longtime musician, record producer, recording engineer, and songwriter.

Becky Lentz (New York, NY) is program officer for Electronic Media Policy at the Ford Foundation (http://www.fordfound.org). In that capacity, Lentz directs a three-year initiative called "Reclaiming the Public Interest in Electronic Media Policy in the U.S.," which focuses on seeding the development of a "field" of sustainable institutions, organizations, coalitions, and networks that can advance the public interest over the long term. The initiative seeks to nurture the evolution of a diverse interdependent cluster of organizations serving key functions in this new field, from legal and regulatory work to organizing, research, strategic communications, and monitoring/watchdog activities. As a practitioner, advocate, and academic, Lentz brings to Ford more than 20 years of combined experience in the information services industry, state and local government, the nonprofit sector, and most recently in academia. As a grantmaker, she is a member of the steering committee of Grantmakers in Film and Electronic Media and chairs its newlyformed Working Group on Media Policy.  


James Love (Washington, D.C.) is director of the Consumer Project on Technology (CPTech). CPTech (http://www.cptech.org) is active in a number of issue areas, including intellectual property, telecommunications, privacy, and electronic commerce, plus a variety of projects relating to antitrust enforcement and policy. Since 1991, Love has been active in issues involving health care and intellectual property. He also works on various e-commerce projects, including those relating to new institutions or systems to deal with cross border issues, including the proposed Convention on Jurisdiction and Foreign Judgments in Civil and Commercial Matters.


Carrie McLaren (Brooklyn, NY) is editor and publisher of Stay Free!,a magazine of media and consumer culture (http://www.stayfreemagazine.org). She is also organizer and curator of Illegal Art: Freedom of Expression in the Corporate Age (http://www.illegal-art.org), an exhibit of nearly 70 works in diverse media that push the legal fringes of intellectual property in our corporate age. Previously McLaren was a producer and the director of advertising at Matador Records.


Laurie Racine (New York, NY) is a senior fellow at the Norman Lear Center. She is currently president of two nonprofit corporations and co-director of the Lear Center's Creativity, Commerce & Culture project. Racine is the president of the Center for the Public Domain, a private foundation endowed by the founders of Red Hat, Inc., devoted to exploring the balance between intellectual property rights and freely reusable knowledge that is the basis of our cultural and scientific heritage. During her tenure, Racine co-founded Public Knowledge, a Washington, D.C., based public interest group that is working to sustain a vibrant information commons. She is also president of Doc Arts, Inc., which produces the Full Frame, formerly DoubleTake, Documentary Film Festival in Durham, North Carolina. Prior to joining the Center for the Public Domain, Racine was the director of the Health Sector Management Program in the Fuqua School of Business at Duke University.

John Russonello (Washington, D.C.) is a principal at Belden, Russonello & Stewart (http://www.brspoll.com). Since 1988, Russonello has conducted research and developed message strategies for political candidates and many nonprofit organizations and associations. As a researcher and writer, he is much sought after for research-based strategic advice, message development, and communications planning. Russonello's research, writing, and consulting have helped organizations involved in environmental, civil rights, education, and other social change issues to listen to the public and communicate in new ways to advance their goals. Before joining Belden, Russonello & Stewart, Russonello had a political consulting practice and was press secretary and speechwriter for House Judiciary Committee Chairman Peter Rodino. Russonello received a BA, cum laude, with honors in political science, from Drew University.


Gigi Sohn (Washington, D.C.) is the president and co-founder of Public Knowledge (http://www.publicknowledge.org), a nonprofit organization that addresses the public''s stake in the convergence of communications policy and intellectual property law. Sohn previously served as a project specialist in the Ford Foundation's Media, Arts and Culture unit. In that capacity, she developed the strategic vision and oversaw grantmaking for the Foundation's first-ever media policy and technology portfolio. Prior to joining the Ford Foundation, Sohn served as executive director of the Media Access Project (MAP), a Washington, D.C. based public interest telecommunications law firm that represents citizens' rights before the Federal Communications Commission and the courts. In recognition of her work at MAP, President Clinton appointed Sohn to serve as a member of his advisory committee on the Public Interest Obligations of Digital Television Broadcasters ("Gore Commission") in October 1997. In that same year, she was selected by  American Lawyer magazine as one of the leading public-sector lawyers in the country under the age of 45. Sohn 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.


Shari Steele (San Francisco, CA) is the executive director of the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), the premier civil liberties organization of the online computer world. She comes back to EFF (http://www.eff.org) after co-founding another nonprofit organization called Bridges.org, which works to ensure sound technology policy in developing nations. For nearly eight years, Steele was director of legal services for EFF. Steele advised individuals and attorneys on issues such as freedom of speech on the Internet and privacy of electronic mail. Steele has written amicus briefs and participated on the legal teams on several precedent-setting cases for electronic communications, including ACLU v. Reno II  before the Third Circuit Court of Appeals challenging the Child Online Protection Act), and Bernstein v. Department of Justice (where the export control laws on encryption were found to be unconstitutional). Steele has spoken about civil liberties law in newly emerging technologies on the CBS Evening News with Dan Rather, C-SPAN's Washington Journal, The Today Show, CNN, the BBC, and National Public Radio's "Morning Edition," "All Things Considered," and "The Diane Rehm Show."


Jeffrey Tuchman (New York, NY) is an award-winning documentary producer and director and the founder of Documania Films (http://www.documaniafilms.com), a New York City-based independent documentary production company. Tuchman has over 30 films to his credit, which have aired on A&E, PBS, ABC, Discovery/TLC, Court TV, CBS, MSNBC, and HBO, among other networks. During the past two decades, Tuchman has made documentaries on issues as far-ranging as AIDS policy, teen gambling, and the HMO crisis, and about characters as diverse as a polygamist in Utah dying of cancer, a 16-year-old heroin addict, and a White House photographer. Tuchman holds a faculty appointment at the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism, where he teaches documentary filmmaking.


Joseph Turow (Philadelphia, PA) is the Robert Lewis Professor of Communication at the University of Pennsylvania's Annenberg School for Communication (http://www.annenbergpublicpolicycenter.org)and director of the Information and Society division of the Annenberg Public Policy Center. He is the author of more than 50 articles and eight books on mass media industries. His continuing work on the Internet and the family and on the Internet and information privacy has received a great deal of attention from the popular press as well as the research community. Turow has written about media in the popular press, including American Demographics magazine and The Los Angeles Times. His research has received financial support from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, the Kaiser Family Foundation, Federal Communications Commission, and the National Endowment for the Humanities, among others. The winner of a number of conference-paper and book awards, he was a Chancellor's Distinguished Lecturer at LSU during Spring 2000.


Margaret B. Wilkerson (New York, NY) is director of Media, Arts and Culture at the Ford Foundation (http://www.fordfound.org) and is responsible for the Foundation's global programs in these fields. She is also professor emerita at the University of California at Berkeley.  In 1998, Wilkerson joined the Ford Foundation as a program officer in Education, Knowledge, and Religion. At Berkeley, she served as director/chair of the Interdisciplinary Graduate Group in Dramatic Art, chair of the Department of African American Studies, and director of the Center for the Study, Education, and Advancement of Women. Under Wilkerson's leadership, two new doctoral programs were developed and approved - in dramatic art and African-American Studies.  She received her M.A. and Ph.D. in dramatic art from Berkeley.  Her research interests are the historical and cultural dimensions of theater; her book, 9 Plays by Black Women, was the first anthology of its kind. She is currently completing a literary biography of the playwright Lorraine Hansberry using, among other sources, Hansberry's private unpublished papers.  Wilkerson has published articles on women in American theater, American theater history, women and work, and educational equity.

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