The Artists' Copyright Conundrum
Artists make difficult choices in deciding where they fall in the copyright debates. They must strike their own balance between seeing copyright as a way to make money and not wanting to alienate their fans. What measures can be taken to defend art against infringement? Are current laws too draconian? Do technologists and advocates of remix culture lessen the value of music?
Presenters
Margot E. Kaminski is the Executive Director of the Information Society Project, and a Lecturer in Law at Yale Law School. She is a graduate of Harvard University and Yale Law School and a former fellow of the Information Society Project. While at Yale Law School, she co-founded of the Media Freedom and Information Access Practicum. Following graduation from Yale Law School, she clerked for The Honorable Andrew J. Kleinfeld of the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals. She has been a Radcliffe Research Fellow at Harvard and a Google Policy Fellow at the Electronic Frontier Foundation. Her research and advocacy work focuses on media freedom, online civil liberties, data mining, and surveillance issues. She has written widely on law and technology issues for law journals and the popular press and has drawn public attention to the civil liberties issues surrounding the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement.
Education
B.A., Columbia University; J.D., Yale University
Biographical Sketch
Professor García is a Visiting Associate Professor and the Frank H. Marks Fellow in Intellectual Property at George Washington University Law School. Her research is focused on the intersection of law and technology, especially as pertains to digital music and copyright.
Before coming to GW Law, Professor García worked in the music industry in Los Angeles; first at Quinn Emanuel where she served as outside counsel to Napster, then as Director of Business Development in charge of content licensing at MySpace Music, and most recently in digital strategy as Director at Universal Music Group. Prior to her work in music, Professor García was an Associate at Wachtell, Lipton, Rosen & Katz in New York.
Professor García graduated cum laude from Columbia University, where she received a B.A. in Economics and was the recipient of both a Kluge Scholarship and the King’s Crown Award for leadership in public service. Professor García attended Yale Law School, where she served as Editor-in-Chief of the Yale Journal for Law & Technology and was a co-founder of Yale Law School’s Student Animal Legal Defense Fund.
In her role as Senior Vice President and Global Content Protection Counsel for the Motion Picture Association of America, Karen Thorland manages domestic content protection civil litigation and oversees the Association's worldwide civil litigation efforts. She also provides legal support for the Association’s worldwide content protection department.
Thorland came to the MPAA from her partnership at Loeb & Loeb, LLP, which she joined in 2001. She has deep experience in a broad range of litigation and intellectual property matters, including copyright and trademark, rights of publicity and privacy, First Amendment, entertainment contractual disputes and appeals. She has represented prominent entertainment industry clients, including major and independent film studios, producers, record labels, and other music companies, as well as interactive companies, internet marketers and advertisers. While at Loeb & Loeb, Thorland was the co-lead counsel for the MPAA member companies in a national litigation campaign related to peer-to-peer file-sharing. She also successfully argued an appeal before the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeal, obtaining the affirmance of a dismissal with prejudice of a karaoke product manufacturer’s declaratory relief action against BMG involving the scope of compulsory licenses and the fair use doctrine. Prior to joining Loeb & Loeb LLP, Thorland was an associate at Jones Day from 1994 to 2001, where she worked on large-scale commercial litigation and intellectual property matters.
Thorland is a frequent speaker on copyright and technology issues, a member and former Trustee of the Los Angeles Copyright Society, and a member of the Academy of Television Arts & Sciences, among other organizations.
Thorland has also done pro bono work on behalf of Jewish Family Services of Los Angeles, The Rape Treatment Center at Santa Monica-UCLA Medical Center and Orthopaedic Hospital, and the ACLU Foundation.
She is a graduate of the University of California at Los Angeles School of Law, and the University of California at Santa Barbara, where she graduated with Highest Honors, College Honors, and Distinction in Major. Thorland currently serves on the UCLA School of Law Alumni Association Board of Directors.
Wendy Seltzer is Policy Counsel to the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) and a Fellow with Yale Law School's Information Society Project, researching openness in intellectual property, innovation, privacy, and free expression online. As a Fellow with Harvard's Berkman Center for Internet & Society, Wendy founded and leads the Chilling Effects Clearinghouse, helping Internet users to understand their rights in response to cease-and-desist threats. She serves on the Board of Directors of The Tor Project, promoting privacy and anonymity research, education, and technology; the World Wide Web Foundation, U.S., dedicated to advancing the web and empowering people by improving Web science, standards, and generative accessibility of Web; and the The Open Source Hardware Association. She seeks to improve technology policy in support of user-driven innovation and communication.
Andrew Bridges represents innovators and their companies in a wide variety of important matters typically involving new technologies or business models, often when a company’s or an entire industry’s future is at stake. His practice includes complex litigation and high-stakes business counseling in Internet, copyright, trademark, advertising, unfair competition, consumer protection, and commercial law matters. Among his prominent successes are:
• Defense of Diamond Multimedia in RIAA v. Diamond Multimedia (challenge to MP3 players)
• Defense of Google in Perfect 10 v. Google (Amazon.com)(challenge to search engine)
• Defense of MasterCard in Perfect 10 v. VISA and MasterCard (challenge to payment processing for alleged infringers)
• Defense of ClearPlay in Huntsman v. Soderbergh (challenge to DVD replay filtering software)
• Recovery of the dajaz1.com domain after its seizure by Homeland Security in Operation In Our Sites.
• Representation of Richard O’Dwyer in fighting extradition from the U.K. and criminal prosecution in the U.K. for hosting a linking site.
He also authored the amicus curiae brief for eBay, Facebook, IAC/InterActiveCorp, and Yahoo! in Viacom v. YouTube.
Thursday, March 14
