Columbus School of Law

Panels

On Challenges to the Rule of Law Raised by New Communications Technologies: Recent Developments

Legal Perspectives

Shira Perlmutter is Vice President and Associate General Counsel for Intellectual Property Policy at AOL Time Warner, where she is responsible for the development and coordination of the company's positions on intellectual property policy issues, including domestic and foreign legislation and international treaties. She previously served as a consultant at WIPO on the copyright issues involved in electronic commerce and as Associate Register for Policy and International Affairs at the United States Copyright Office, where she advised Congress on the Digital Millennium Copyright Act of 1998. She was a key member of the United States delegation that negotiated the two new WIPO treaties on copyright and related rights, and also served as the expert on the copyright law of the United States during the TRIPS Council review of developed countries' copyright laws. She was formerly a law professor at The Catholic University of America, where she taught copyright and other intellectual property courses. She is the author of numerous articles on copyright issues as well as co-author of the recent casebook International Intellectual Property Law (2001).

Marybeth Peters is United States Register of Copyrights and Director of the United States Copyright Office, a position she has held since 1994. Previously, she held the position of Policy Planning Advisor to the Register. She is also a past Acting General Counsel of the Copyright Office and chief of both the Copyright Office's Examining and the Information and Reference divisions. She has also been a consultant on copyright law to WIPO. She has taught copyright law as a lecturer in the Communications Law Institute of The Catholic University of America School of Law and as an adjunct professor at The University of Miami School of Law and the Georgetown University Law Center. A frequent speaker on copyright issues, Ms. Peters is the author of The General Guide to the Copyright Act of 1976.

Jonathan Zittrain is Jack N. & Lillian R. Berkman Assistant Professor for Entrepreneurial Legal Studies at Harvard Law School, and a faculty director of its Berkman Center for Internet & Society. His research includes digital property, privacy, and speech, and the role that is played by private intermediaries in Internet architecture. He currently teaches "Internet & Society: The Technologies and Politics of Control", and has a strong interest in creative, useful, and unobtrusive ways to deploy technology in the classroom. He is co-author of the forthcoming casebook Internet Law (2003). He is co-counsel to the plaintiffs in Eldred v. Ashcroft.

Historical and Comparative Perspectives

Lillian R. BeVier is John S. Shannon Distinguished Professor of Law and Class of 1963 Research Professor at the University of Virginia School of Law. For the present academic year, she is Visiting Professor at New York University School of Law. She previously served on the faculty of the University of Santa Clara Law School. A sought-after speaker, Professor BeVier has been a frequent lecturer to Federalist Society Chapters at various national law schools and has recently testified before the Senate Rules Committee and the Senate Judiciary Committee on the constitutionality of proposed campaign finance regulations. She teaches courses on constitutional law, with a special emphasis on free expression, as well as on intellectual property law. Widely published in these areas, her works include "The Invisible Hand of the Marketplace of Ideas" in Geoffrey Stone and Lee Bollinger, eds., Eternally Vigilant (2002) and Is Free TV for Federal Candidates Constitutional? (1998).

Oren Bracha is a candidate for the S.J.D. degree at Harvard Law School and is writing his dissertation on the history of intellectual property in the United States. He is the recipient of the Mark DeWolfe Howe Fellowship for Legal History as well as the Byse Fellowship. He previously served as a law clerk to Chief Justice Aharon Barak of the Supreme Court of Israel. He teaches a workshop at Harvard Law School entitled "Owning Ideas: Theoretical and Historical Perspectives on Intellectual Property." He is the author of "Unfortunate or Perilous: The Infiltrators, the Law and the Supreme Court 1948-1954" (1998).

Daniel Gervais is Oslers Professor of Technology Law at the University
of Ottawa, where he teaches courses on intellectual property law and e-commerce. He previously served as Consultant and Legal Advisor to the GATT/World Trade Organization. There, he participated in drafting of the WTO Agreement on Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS). He has served as Head of the Section dealing with Copyright & Digital Technology at WIPO; Assistant Secretary-General of
the International Confederation of Societies of Authors and Composers (CISAC); Vice-Chairman of the International Federation of Reproduction Rights organizations (IFRRO) and Vice-President of Copyright Clearance Center, Inc. (CCC). Professor Gervais has also been a consultant to the Paris-based Organisation for Economic Co-operation & Development (OECD). He has published numerous articles on international copyright law and cyberlaw. He has also published a standard reference book on the TRIPS Agreement, The TRIPS Agreement: Drafting History and Analysis (1998).

Philosophical Perspectives

Amitai Etzioni is University Professor at The George Washington University. He previously served on the faculties of Columbia University, and the Harvard Business School where he was the Thomas Henry Carroll Ford Foundation Professor. He is a past president of the American Sociological Association, and the International Society for the Advancement of Socio-Economics, which he also founded. He has served as Senior Advisor to the White House in the Carter Administration and has been a guest scholar at the Brookings Institution. He is the editor of the journal, The Responsive Community: Rights and Responsibilities. Among many other academic awards, he has been the recipient of the John P. McGovern Award in Behavioral Sciences as well as the Officer's Cross of the Order of Merit of the Federal Republic of Germany. He is the author of more than a score of books including The Monochrome Society (2001), Next: The Road to the Good Society (2001), and The Limits of Privacy (1999).

Jude P. Dougherty is Dean Emeritus of the School of Philosophy at The Catholic University of America. He is the editor of the Review of Metaphysics and is also the general editor of the Catholic University of America Press series: Studies in Philosophy and the History of Philosophy. He has published numerous books and articles on such topics as metaphysics, religion and culture, and epistemology. Examples of his work include Western Creed, Western Identity: Essays in Legal and Social Philosophy (2000) and The Logic of Religion (forthcoming).

Peter Levine is Research Scholar at the Institute for Philosophy and Public Policy at the University of Maryland's School of Public Affairs. He is Deputy Director of CIRCLE (the Center for Information and Research on Civic Learning and Engagement). He pursued his education at Yale University and at Oxford University, where he was a Rhodes Scholar. He is working with high school students in Prince George's County, Maryland to create an "Information Commons". He has published widely on democracy and civic responsibility. His recent books include The New Progressive Era: Toward a Fair and Deliberative Democracy (2000) and Living Without Philosophy: On Narrative, Rhetoric, and Morality (1998).