Symposium 2026: Origins, Evolution, and Possible Futures of the 1976 Copyright Act: Speakers
Shyam Balganesh
Columbia Law School
Shyam Balganesh writes and teaches in the areas of copyright law, intellectual property, and legal theory. He has written extensively on understanding how intellectual property and innovation policy can benefit from the use of ideas, concepts, and structures from different areas of the common law, especially private law. His recent work explores the interaction between copyright law and key institutional features of the American legal system. He is also working on a series of articles advancing an account of “legal internalism” that explains the shape and trajectory of legal thinking. Balganesh’s work has appeared in leading law journals, including the Columbia Law Review, Harvard Law Review, Stanford Law Review, University of Pennsylvania Law Review, and Yale Law Journal. He is also a co-author of sections of the leading copyright law treatise Nimmer on Copyright.
Before joining the Columbia Law School faculty in 2021, Balganesh was a professor of law and co-director of the Center for Technology, Innovation and Competition at the University of Pennsylvania Carey Law School. Prior to that, he was a Bigelow Fellow at the University of Chicago Law School. He received a J.D. from Yale Law School, where he was an articles and essays editor of the Yale Law Journal and a student fellow at the Information Society Project. Prior to that, he spent two years as a Rhodes Scholar at Balliol College, Oxford, where he received a B.C.L. and M.Phil.
In 2017, he was elected a member of the American Law Institute, and since 2015 he has served as an adviser to the Restatement of the Law, Copyright. Balganesh also has been recognized for his teaching: In 2017, he received the Robert A. Gorman Award for Excellence in Teaching and, in 2015, the A. Leo Levin Award for Excellence in an Introductory Course, both at the University of Pennsylvania Law School.
Bruce Boyden
Marquette University Law School
Professor Bruce Boyden teaches and writes in the areas of copyright, Internet law, privacy, legal history, and civil procedure. His scholarship focuses on the evolution of copyright and privacy law in response to technological and social change. His previous articles include The Grapes of Roth, 99 Wash. L. Rev. 1093 (2024); The Game, the Players, and the Board, 109 Iowa L. Rev. Online 105 (2024); Daly v. Palmer, or the Melodramatic Origins of the Ordinary Observer, 68 Syracuse L. Rev. 147 (2018); Emergent Works, 39 Colum. J.L. & Arts 377 (2016); Aereo and the Problem of Machine Volition, 2015 Mich. St. L. Rev. 485; Regulating at the End of Privacy, 2013 U. Chi. Legal F. 173; and Games and Other Uncopyrightable Systems, 18 Geo. Mason L. Rev. 439 (2011). He is currently researching minimal creativity for selections under copyright law.
Prior to joining the faculty at Marquette, Professor Boyden was a visiting professor at Washington & Lee University School of Law and at Michigan State University College of Law. Before that, he was in private practice for several years with the law firm Proskauer Rose LLP, where his practice focused on copyright, digital rights management, privacy, and Internet law. Professor Boyden is a graduate of Yale Law School, where he served as Notes Editor of the Yale Law Journal and as an Editor of the Yale Journal of Law & Feminism. He received his M.A. in history from Northwestern University and his B.A., summa cum laude, from the University of Arkansas in history and philosophy.
Niva Elkin-Koren
Tel Aviv University
Niva Elkin-Koren is a Professor of Law at Tel Aviv University Faculty of Law and a Faculty Associate at the Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University. She is the academic director of the Chief Justice Meir Shamgar Center for Digital Law and Innovation, a co-director of the Algorithmic Governance Lab at TAU Innovation Lab (“TIL”) and a member of the Academic Management Committee of TAU Center for Artificial Intelligence and Data Science. Before joining Tel-Aviv University, she served as the Dean of the Law Faculty at the University of Haifa, and was the founding director of the Center for Cyber, Law and Policy (CCLP) and of the Haifa Center for Law & Technology (HCLT). Her research is located at the intersection between law and information technology, focusing on values in design, intellectual property, governance by AI and governance of AI. S.J.D., Stanford Law School; LL.M Harvard Law School; LL.B. Faculty of Law, Tel Aviv University.
Dave Fagundes
Emory University School of Law
Professor Dave Fagundes writes and teaches about property, including copyright, real estate, and wills and trusts.
Fagundes's most recent and forthcoming scholarship focuses on how property rhetoric affects lay perceptions of ownership, the intersection of copyright and administrative law, the terminal doctrines of intellectual property, and the Anna Nicole Smith estates litigation. His articles have appeared in the New York University Law Review, Cornell Law Review, Northwestern University Law Review, Texas Law Review, and Vanderbilt Law Review, among others. His work has been selected for presentation at leading national venues including the Stanford/Yale Junior Faculty Forum and the plenary session of the IP Scholars’ Conference (on two occasions) and has been showcased five times in the Journal of Things We Like Lots (JOTWELL).
Fagundes previously taught at the University of Houston Law Center (UHLC) and at Southwestern Law School in Los Angeles, California. Prior to entering academia, he worked as a Bigelow Fellow and Lecturer in Law at the University of Chicago Law School, an associate at the Washington, DC office of Jenner & Block, LLP, and a clerk to Judge David S. Tatel of the US Court of Appeals for the DC Circuit.
Fagundes was named UHLC Professor of the Year in 2020 and was awarded the University of Houston’s Teaching Excellence Award in 2023. He was elected to the American Law Institute in July 2020. A.B., Harvard University; J.D., Harvard Law School.
Kristelia García
Georgetown Law
Kristelia García is the Leo George Professor of Communications, Entertainment, and New Media, and an Anne Fleming Research Professor, at Georgetown Law. She holds a JD from Yale Law School, and a BA in Economics from Columbia University. Prior to joining the faculty at Georgetown, she taught at the University of Colorado Law School, was a Fellow at the George Washington University Law School, and spent nearly a decade working in the music industry. Her work has been published in numerous journals, including Vanderbilt Law Review, California Law Review, and NYU Law Review.
Jane Ginsburg
Columbia Law School
The faculty director of Columbia’s Kernochan Center for Law, Media and the Arts, Jane C. Ginsburg is a renowned authority on intellectual property law and a staunch defender of authors’ rights. She teaches and writes about copyright law, international copyright law, legal methods, statutory methods, and trademark law. She is also the author or co-author of casebooks on all five subjects, including International Copyright: U.S. and EU Perspectives (with Edouard Treppoz) and Copyright: Cases and Materials (10th edition) (with Robert A. Gorman and R. Anthony Reese). Ginsburg was a co-reporter for the American Law Institute’s Principles of the Law, Intellectual Property: Principles Governing Jurisdiction, Choice of Law, and Judgments in Transnational Disputes.
Fluent in French and Italian, Ginsburg has been a visiting professor at law schools and universities in France and Italy as well as in Australia, England, Israel, and New Zealand. She is a vice president of the Association Littéraire et Artistique Internationale, a Paris-based international organization created to promote and defend authors’ rights, and president of its U.S. chapter. She is an elected member of the American Philosophical Society and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, a Foreign Fellow of the Accademia Nazionale dei Lincei (Rome), a Corresponding Fellow of the British Academy, and an Honorary Fellow of Emmanuel College, University of Cambridge. Doctor of Law, Université de Paris II, 1995; D.E.A., Université de Paris II, 1985; J.D., Harvard Law School, 1980; M.A., University of Chicago, 1977; B.A., University of Chicago, 1976
Paul Goldstein
Stanford Law School
A globally recognized expert on intellectual property law, Paul Goldstein is the author of an influential five-volume treatise on U.S. copyright law and a one-volume treatise on international copyright law. He has authored twelve books including five novels. Some of his other works include Copyright’s Highway: From Gutenberg to the Celestial Jukebox, a widely acclaimed book on the history and future of copyright and Intellectual Property: The Tough New Realities That Could Make or Break Your Business. Havana Requiem, his third novel, won the 2013 Harper Lee Prize for Legal Fiction.
In 2015 Paul Goldstein was inducted by Intellectual Asset Management into the IP Hall of Fame, which honors those who have helped to establish intellectual property as one of the key business assets of the 21st century. He currently serves as of counsel at Morrison & Foerster in their intellectual property group and has been regularly included in Best Lawyers in America. He has served as chairman of the U.S. Office of Technology Assessment Advisory Panel on Intellectual Property Rights in an Age of Electronics and Information, has been a visiting scholar at the Max Planck Institute for Foreign and International Patent, Copyright, and Competition Law in Munich, Germany and was a founding faculty member of the Munich Intellectual Property Law Center. In addition, before joining the Stanford Law School faculty in 1975, he was a professor of law at the State University of New York at Buffalo Law School. BA, Brandeis University 1964; LLB, Columbia University School of Law 1967
Joe Keeley
Keeley Law & Policy; former Chief IP Counsel, U.S. House Judiciary Committee
Joe Keeley was the Chief Counsel of the Senate Budget Committee during the 2021 and 2022 budget reconciliation process that produced the American Rescue Plan Act of 2021 and the Inflation Reduction Act of 2022. He is the only attorney to have served as the Chief Intellectual Property Counsel of both the U.S. House of Representatives (2013-2018) and the U.S. Senate (2019-2020)
Joe was the General Counsel of the Senate Judiciary Committee during 2019 and 2020. In the intellectual property policy area, he was responsible for most IP legislation over the past decade including the Music Modernization Act, the CASE Act, the Trademark Modernization Act, a provision to create a felony penalty for illegal streaming, the Unlocking Consumer Choice and Wireless Competition Act, and the Family Movie Act.
The Hon. Judge Pierre Leval
U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit
Pierre Leval is a United States Circuit Judge of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit. At the time of his appointment in 1993, he was a United States District Court Judge in the Southern District of New York.
Judge Leval received his B.A. degree from Harvard College in 1959 and his J.D. degree magna cum laude in 1963 from the Harvard Law School, where he served as Note Editor of the Harvard Law Review.
Judge Leval served in the U.S. Army in 1959. He was a law clerk for Judge Henry J. Friendly of the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit from 1963 until 1964. Judge Leval was an Assistant United States Attorney in the Southern District of New York from 1964 until 1968, serving there as Chief Appellate Attorney from 1967 to 1968. From 1969 until 1975, Judge Leval was in private law practice as an associate and then a partner in the New York firm of Cleary, Gottlieb, Steen & Hamilton. He joined the New York County District Attorney's Office in 1975, where he served first as First Assistant District Attorney, and subsequently as Chief Assistant District Attorney. In 1977, he was appointed to the United States District Court for the Southern District of New York.
Judge Leval is a member of the Adjunct Faculty of the New York University School of Law. He was awarded the Hillmon Memorial Fellowship by the University of Wisconsin in 1988; the Donald R. Brace Memorial Lectureship by the Copyright Society of the U.S.A. in 1989; the Fowler Harper Memorial Fellowship by Yale Law School in 1992; the Melville Nimmer Lectureship by UCLA Law School in 1997; the Learned Hand Medal of the Federal Bar Council in 1997; and the University of Connecticut School of Law's Intellectual Property Keynote Lectureship for 2001. He assumed Senior Judge status in 2002.
Jessica Litman
University of Michigan Law School
Jessica Litman is the John F. Nickoll Professor of Law at the University of Michigan. She is the author of Digital Copyright and the co-author, with Jane Ginsburg, Mary Lou Kevlin, and Rebecca Tushnet, of the casebook Trademarks and Unfair Competition Law: Cases and Materials.
Before rejoining the Michigan Law faculty in 2006, Litman was a professor of law at Wayne State University, a visiting professor at New York University School of Law and at American University Washington College of Law, and a professor at Michigan Law from 1984 to 1990. In addition, she has taught copyright law at the University of Tokyo as part of the Law Faculty Exchange Program.
Litman has been a trustee of the Copyright Society of the USA, chair of the Association of American Law Schools Section on Intellectual Property, and an adviser for the American Law Institute’s Restatement of Copyright. She has also served on the Future of Music Coalition’s advisory council and the advisory board for Public Knowledge. Reed College, BA; Southern Methodist University, MFA; Columbia University, JD
Philippa Loengard
Columbia Law School
Philippa Loengard joined the Kernochan Center for Law, Media and the Arts at Columbia Law School in 2006.
Her research focuses on issues surrounding the visual arts and entertainment industries. She is particularly interested in issues of taxation as they pertain to the arts and the rights of authors and creators. Loengard is the Chair of the Copyright Division of the ABA. She also serves as the Chair of the Artists' Rights subcommittee of the Art Law Committee of the New York City Bar Association. She was in private practice at Kramer Levin Naftalis & Frankel before joining the Kernochan Center staff.
An interest in intellectual property issues as they related to her work in documentary film provoked her return to law school. Prior to attending law school, Loengard worked in television production for several years as an assistant director on multiple shows and also as a coordinating producer for A&E Television Networks.
She is a graduate of Columbia Law School, where she was a Harlan Fiske Stone scholar and an article editor for the Journal of Law and the Arts. Loengard holds an LL.M. from New York University School of Law. Loengard graduated with a master’s degree from Stanford University, where she was the 1994 recipient of the Karl A. and Medira Bickel Fellowship, and has a bachelor’s degree from Cornell University.
Caitlin McGrail
Columbia Law School
Caitlin McGrail is an Associate Research Scholar at the Kernochan Center for Law, Media and the Arts. She graduated magna cum laude from Villanova University Charles Widger School of Law where she was a recipient of the Best Memorandum Award, served as teaching assistant for legal writing courses, and was inducted into Order of the Coif. She was a student works editor of the Villanova Law Review, received the Volume 67 Law Review Dedication Award, and published a student note on the Visual Artists Rights Act. Prior to joining the Kernochan Center in 2024, she was in private practice at Kirkland & Ellis LLP. Before law school, she worked at non-profit cultural institutions in development and administration. She graduated from Wellesley College with a bachelor’s degree in art history.
Peter Menell
UC Berkeley School of Law
After earning his J.D. and Ph.D. in economics, Peter Menell clerked for Judge Jon O. Newman of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit. He joined the Berkeley Law faculty in 1990 and soon began laying the groundwork for the Berkeley Center for Law & Technology (BCLT), which he co-founded in 1995. Professor Menell served as BCLT’s Executive Director from 1999 to 2005 and continues to serve as a Director. In 2018, Professor Menell co-founded the Berkeley Judicial Institute (BJI) with former FJC Director and Judge Jeremy Fogel and Dean Erwin Chemerinsky. BJI fills a long-standing need to establish an effective bridge between the legal academy and the judiciary for the primary purpose of promoting judicial integrity and judicial independence. In 2021, Professor Menell co-founded BCLT’s Life Sciences & Innovation Project.
Professor Menell’s research and teaching span intellectual property across the digital technology and entertainment fields, as well as environmental law and policy, property law, law and economics, and judiciary reform. His current teaching focuses on intellectual property law, legal protection for digital technology, technological disruption and social justice, intellectual property protection in the entertainment industries, life sciences and innovation, and judiciary reform.
Professor Menell has authored more than 100 articles and 15 books, including leading casebooks, intellectual property treatises, and research handbooks. He has also made substantial contributions to Nimmer on Copyright. Professor Menell’s monograph-length Brace Lecture, This American Copyright Life: Reflections on Re-equilibrating Copyright for the Internet Age(opens in a new tab), is published in the Journal of the Copyright Society of the U.S.A., Vol. 61, pp. 235-371 (2014). The Harvard Journal of Law & Technology featured Professor Menell’s monograph, Rise of the API Copyright Dead?: An Updated Epitaph for Copyright Protection of Network and Functional Features of Computer Software(opens in a new tab), Vol. 31, pp. 305-490, in its Spring 2018 Special Issue on software interface copyright. The California Law Review published Revisiting and Confronting the Federal Judiciary Capacity ‘Crisis’: Charting a Path for Federal Judiciary Reform(opens in a new tab) (with Ryan Vacca) as the lead article for the June 2020 Symposium issue. In 2021, the Berkeley Technology Law Journal published a special issue on design patent law featuring Design Patent Law’s Identity Crisis(opens in a new tab) (with Ella Padon-Corren) as the lead article.
Professor Menell has organized more than 60 intellectual property education programs for the Federal Judicial Center, including an annual multi-day program on “Intellectual Property in the Digital Age” since 1998, and a webinar series. He is the lead author of the Patent Case Management Judicial Guide(opens in a new tab), a 1200 page treatise now in its third edition, published by the Federal Judicial Center for federal judges. Professor Menell has advised the U.S. Congress, federal agencies, state Attorneys General, and major technology and entertainment companies on a wide range of intellectual property and antitrust matters. Congress adopted Professor Menell’s proposal to immunize whistleblowers from trade secret liability in the Defend Trade Secret Act of 2016, 18 U.S.C. § 1833. See Peter S. Menell, Tailoring a Public Policy Exception to Trade Secret Protection(opens in a new tab), 105 California Law Review 1 (2017); Peter S. Menell, The Defend Trade Secrets Act Whistleblower Immunity Provision: A Legislative History(opens in a new tab), 1 Univ. Missouri Business, Entrepreneurship & Tax Review 397 (2017). Professor Menell has authored numerous amicus briefs on intellectual property issues. Professor Menell is a Member of the American Law Institute and serves as an Adviser to the Copyright Restatement Project. S.B., Massachusetts Institute of Technology (1980); M.A., Stanford University (1982); J.D., Harvard Law School (1986); Ph.D., Stanford University (1986)
Tom Merrill
Columbia Law School
One of the most cited legal scholars in the United States, Thomas Merrill teaches and writes about administrative, constitutional, and property law, among other topics.
Merrill’s experience in the public and private sectors informs his pedagogy and research. After clerking for Chief Judge David L. Bazelon on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit and for Justice Harry A. Blackmun on the U.S. Supreme Court, Merrill was a deputy solicitor general of the U.S. Department of Justice and an associate at the firm of Sidley & Austin, where he also served as counsel for more than 20 years.
He has written scholarly articles and several Supreme Court amicus briefs on when and how much weight courts should give administrative interpretations of law in different contexts.
He has co-authored (with Henry E. Smith) the casebooks Property: Principles and Policies and The Oxford Introductions to U.S. Law: Property. His seminal journal articles include “Optimal Standardization in the Law of Property: The Numerus Clausus Principle” on the role of information costs in the structure of property law and “The Origins of the American Public Trust Doctrine: What Really Happened in Illinois Central” about the role of public property rights in the development of the Chicago lakefront. For the 125th anniversary celebration of the 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, Merrill delivered the annual Hands Lecture, and he spoke on “Learned Hand and Statutory Interpretation: Theory and Practice.” Lakefront: Public Trust and Private Rights in Chicago (Cornell University Press), his book (with Joseph Kearney) on the history of the Chicago Lakefront, was published in May 2021. Merrill is currently serving as a co-reporter for the American Law Institute’s Restatement (Fourth) of Property.
In addition to Columbia, Merrill has served on the faculties of Northwestern Law School and Yale Law School. He is a member of the American Law Institute and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. J.D., University of Chicago Law School, 1977; B.A., University of Oxford, 1973; B.A., Grinnell College, 1971
The Hon. Judge Jon Newman
U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit
Jon O. Newman is a United States Circuit Judge of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit. He assumed senior status in 1997. At the time of his appointment in 1979, he was a United States District Court Judge for the District of Connecticut. Judge Newman was Chief Judge from 1993 to 1997.
Judge Newman received his B.A. degree from Princeton University in 1953, and his LL.B. degree from Yale Law School in 1956.
Judge Newman served in the U.S. Army Reserve from 1954 until 1962. Following his graduation from law school, he was a law clerk for Judge George T. Washington of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit. From 1957 to 1958, he was senior law clerk to Chief Justice Earl Warren of the United States Supreme Court. Judge Newman returned to Connecticut in 1958 to engage in private law practice in Hartford. In 1960, he was appointed Special Counsel to Governor Abraham Ribicoff of Connecticut. The next year he became Executive Assistant to Mr. Ribicoff in the latter's new position as U.S. Secretary of Health, Education and Welfare. In 1963, after Secretary Ribicoff had been elected United States Senator from Connecticut, Judge Newman became his Administrative Assistant. From 1964 until 1969, Judge Newman was the United States Attorney for the District of Connecticut. He returned to private law practice in Hartford in 1969, at which he remained until taking up service in 1971 as a United States District Court Judge for the District of Connecticut.
Maria Pallante
Association of American Publishers; former Register of Copyrights
Maria A. Pallante is President and CEO of the Association of American Publishers (AAP), where she leads policy and litigation priorities for the modern publishing industry, with a particular focus on copyright, freedom of expression, and digital markets. She is a graduate of the George Washington University Law School where she teaches copyright law.
From 2011 to 2016, Ms. Pallante served as Register of Copyrights and Director of the US Copyright Office during an extremely active period of statutory and regulatory modernization in which the Office worked closely with Congress to address gaps in the law, publishing key studies on such issues as the “making available” right under US law, music licensing reform, and solutions for small copyright claims, as well the Office’s first public index of fair use opinions. She overhauled the Compendium of US Copyright Office Practices, making it widely available for the first time as a living digital publication for courts, lawyers, and examiners, and established both the Barbara A. Ringer Honors Fellowship and Abraham L. Kaminstein Scholar in Residence program. As Register, she testified before Congress numerous times and represented the United States on treaty and trade delegations.
A recognized authority on copyright law, Ms. Pallante has delivered numerous distinguished lectures in the field, including the Manges Lecture at Columbia Law (“The Next Great Copyright Act”); the Meyer Lecture at GW Law (“The Next Generation Copyright Office: What it Means and Why it Matters”); the Kastenmeier Lecture At the University of Wisconsin Law School (“I am the Captain Now”); and, most recently, the Copyright Society’s Brace Lecture at Fordham Law (“The Art and Innovation of Exclusive Rights”). Ms. Pallante serves on several advisory bodies, including the American Bar Association’s Copyright Task Force, the George Mason University Center for Intellectual Property x Innovation Policy (C-CIP2) Advisory Board, and the Americana Music Foundation Board of Directors. She is a former Trustee of the Copyright Society and a recipient of the DC Bar’s Champion of Intellectual Property Award.
Earlier in her career, Ms. Pallante served for eight years as in-house counsel with the Guggenheim Museums and Foundation, New York, where she advised on contemporary art exhibitions, publications, and governance, and directed the global trademark licensing and branding program for the institution’s famous name, buildings, and collections. She began her career in private practice and as staff counsel with the Authors Guild and National Writers Union.
Shira Perlmutter
Register of Copyrights, U.S. Copyright Office
Shira Perlmutter is the Register of Copyrights and Director of the U.S. Copyright Office. Appointed in October 2020, Perlmutter advises Congress and executive branch agencies on copyright policy and directs the administration of important provisions of the U.S. Copyright Act, leading a workforce of nearly 500 employees.
Prior to her appointment as Register, Perlmutter had served since 2012 as Chief Policy Officer and Director for International Affairs at the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO). In that position, Perlmutter was a policy advisor to the Under Secretary of Commerce for Intellectual Property and oversaw the USPTO’s domestic and international IP policy activities, including through the Office of Governmental Affairs, the Global Intellectual Property Academy (GIPA), the IP Attaché Program, and the Office of the Chief Economist.
Before joining the USPTO, Perlmutter was Executive Vice President for Global Legal Policy at the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry (IFPI). Prior to that, she held the position of Vice President and Associate General Counsel for Intellectual Property Policy at Time Warner.
Perlmutter previously worked at the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) in Geneva as a consultant on copyright and electronic commerce. In 1995, she was appointed as the first Associate Register for Policy and International Affairs at the U.S. Copyright Office.
From 1990 through 1995, Perlmutter was a law professor at The Catholic University of America, teaching copyright, trademark, and unfair competition law, as well as international intellectual property law. While on the faculty, she was the copyright consultant to the Clinton Administration’s Advisory Council on the National Information Infrastructure. Earlier in her career, she practiced law in New York City, specializing in copyright and trademark counseling and litigation. She is a co-author of a leading casebook on international intellectual property law and policy, has published numerous articles on copyright issues, and is a research fellow at the Oxford Intellectual Property Research Centre at Oxford University.
Perlmutter received an AB from Harvard University and a JD from the University of Pennsylvania.
Ralph Oman
George Washington University Law School; former Register of Copyrights
Ralph Oman was born in 1940 in Huntington, New York. He majored in history at Hamilton College and spent his junior year at the Sorbonne. From 1962 to 1964, he worked for the U.S. Department of State as a Foreign Service officer in Saudi Arabia. Oman served with the U.S. Navy as a naval flight officer from 1965 to 1970 and was decorated several times for his service in Vietnam. He is retired from the U.S. Naval Reserve.
Following his military service, Oman attended Georgetown Law School, where he was executive editor of the International Law Journal. He received a doctor of laws degree in corporate and international law in 1973. Afterward, he clerked for a federal district judge and then joined the Antitrust Division of the U.S. Department of Justice as a trial lawyer. In 1975, Senator Hugh Scott of Pennsylvania hired Oman as his Senate Judiciary Committee counsel. Oman assisted the senator with major antitrust, civil rights, and copyright legislation, including the 1976 Copyright Act. When Senator Scott retired, Oman worked for Senator Charles Mathias of Maryland as his Judiciary Committee counsel. In 1980, Oman became chief counsel to the Senate Subcommittee on Patents, Copyrights, and Trademarks.
Oman was named Register of Copyrights on September 23, 1985. As Register, he testified before Congress many times and led U.S. delegations in international negotiations at the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO). In 1990, he was president of a WIPO diplomatic conference that adopted the Treaty on the Protection of Intellectual Property in Respect of Integrated Circuits. During his tenure, Oman also helped move the United States toward adoption of the Berne Convention for the Protection of Literary and Artistic Works, a longtime goal of U.S. Registers of Copyrights.
Oman retired from government service in 1993. Since then, he has worked in private practice and taught at George Washington University Law School, where he continues to teach full time as a Practitioner-in-Residence. He has filed many expert reports and amicus briefs, and he is active in the Intellectual Property Law Section of the American Bar Association. Most recently, he was chair of the Copyright Division and copyright liaison to WIPO. He is a member of the District of Columbia Bar and the Supreme Court Bar.
Jennifer Rothman
University of Pennsylvania Carey Law School
Jennifer E. Rothman is globally recognized for her scholarship in the field of intellectual property, privacy, and entertainment & media law, and is the leading expert on right of publicity and personality rights. Rothman holds a secondary appointment at the Annenberg School for Communication.
Rothman’s scholarship focuses on conflicts between intellectual property rights and other constitutionally protected rights, particularly the freedom of speech. Much of Rothman’s recent work focuses on the ways intellectual property laws are employed to turn people into a form of property. Her book, The Right of Publicity: Privacy Reimagined for a Public World, published by Harvard University Press, has been described as the “definitive biography of the right of publicity.” Rothman is also the author of numerous essays and articles that regularly appear in top law reviews and journals, including most recently “Postmortem Privacy”, published in the Michigan Law Review, and “Navigating the Identity Thicket: Trademark’s Lost Theory of Personality, the Right of Publicity, and Preemption”, published in the Harvard Law Review. Her Donald C. Brace Lecture, “Copyrighting People”, is forthcoming in the Journal of the Copyright Society.
Rothman has testified in Congress multiples times, most recently to address issues involving intellectual property, personality rights, and artificial intelligence. Rothman is also the creator of Rothman’s Roadmap to the Right of Publicity, an online resource, located at www.rightofpublicityroadmap.com, that provides expert analysis of right of publicity and related laws, as well as commentary on recent cases and legislation.
Professor Rothman is the Reporter for the Uniform Law Commission Study of the Protection of Name, Image, and Likeness Rights, an elected member of the American Law Institute, and an adviser on the Restatement of the Law (Third) of Torts: Defamation and Privacy.
Rothman received her AB from Princeton University where she received the Asher Hinds Book Prize and the Grace May Tilton Prize. Rothman received an MFA in film production from the University of Southern California’s School of Cinematic Arts, where she directed an award-winning documentary. Rothman received her JD from UCLA, where she graduated first in her class and won the Jerry Pacht Memorial Constitutional Law Award for her scholarship in that field. Rothman served as law clerk to the Honorable Marsha S. Berzon of the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit in San Francisco. Rothman joined the Penn faculty in 2021, after serving as a member of the faculty at Washington University in St. Louis and as the William G. Coskran Chair at Loyola Law School in Los Angeles. Rothman has also worked in the film industry, including a position in feature production at Paramount Pictures, and as an entertainment and intellectual property litigator in Los Angeles.
Pam Samuelson
UC Berkeley School of Law
Pamela Samuelson is the Richard M. Sherman Distinguished Professor of Law and Information at the University of California, Berkeley. She is recognized as a pioneer in digital copyright law, intellectual property, cyberlaw and information policy. Since 1996, she has held a joint appointment at Berkeley Law School and UC Berkeley’s School of Information. Samuelson is a director of the internationally-renowned Berkeley Center for Law & Technology. She is co-founder and chair of the board of Authors Alliance, a nonprofit organization that promotes the public interest in access to knowledge. She also serves on the board of directors of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, as well as on the advisory boards for the Electronic Privacy Information Center, the Center for Democracy & Technology, and Public Knowledge.
Samuelson began her legal career as an associate with Willkie Farr & Gallagher in New York. She began her career as a legal academic at the University of Pittsburgh School of Law, from which she visited at Columbia, Cornell, and Emory Law Schools. While on the Berkeley faculty, she has been a distinguished visiting professor at University of Toronto Law School as well as a visiting professor at the University of Melbourne and Harvard Law Schools. She was named an honorary professor at the University of Amsterdam in 2002.
Samuelson has written and published extensively in the areas of copyright, software protection and cyberlaw. Her recent publications include: Generative AI Meets Copyright, 381 Science 158 (2023); Discovering the Impact of eBay on Copyright Injunctions Through Empirical Evidence, 64 Wm. & Mary L. Rev. 1447 (2023) (with Matthew Sag); Withholding Injunctions in Copyright Cases: The Impact of eBay, 63 Wm. & Mary L. Rev. (2022); Interfaces and Interoperability After Google v. Oracle, 100 Texas L. Rev. 1 (2021) (with Mark A. Lemley); The Disgorgement Remedy of Design Patent Law, 108 Calif. L. Rev. 183 (2020) (with Mark P. Gergen); Staking the Boundaries of Software Copyrights in the Shadow of Patents, 71 Fla. L. Rev. (2019); Saving Software’s Fair Use Future, 31 Harv. J. L. & Tech. 535 (2018) (with Clark D. Asay); Strategies for Discerning the Boundaries of Copyrights and Utility Patents, 92 Notre Dame L. Rev. 1493 (2017); Functionality and Expression in Computer Programs, 31 Berkeley Tech. L. J. 1215 (2016); Functional Compilations, 54 Houston L. Rev. 321 (2016); Reconceptualizing Copyright’s Merger Doctrine, 63 J. Cop. Soc’y 417 (2016); Notice Failures Arising From Copyright’s Duration Rules, 96 B. U. L. Rev. 667 (2016); Freedom to Tinker, 17 Theor’l Inquir. L. 563 (2016).
Other notable publications include: The Google Book Settlement as Copyright Reform, 2011 Wisc. L. Rev. 478; Google Book Search and the Future of Books in Cyberspace, 94 Minn. L. Rev. 1308 (2010); Statutory Damages in U.S. Copyright Law: A Remedy in Need of Reform, 51 Wm. & Mary L. Rev. 439 (2009) (with Tara Wheatland); High Technology Entrepreneurs and the Patent System: Results of the 2008 Berkeley Patent Survey (with Stuart J.H. Graham, Robert P. Merges, & Ted Sichelman), 24 Berkeley Technology L. J. 1255 (2010); Why Copyright Excludes Systems and Processes From the Scope of Its Protection, 85 Tex. L. Rev. 1921 (2007); Unbundling Fair Uses, 77 Fordham L. Rev. 2537 (2007); Enriching Discourse on Public Domains, 55 Duke L. J. 783 (2006); Intellectual Property Arbitrage: How Foreign Rules Can Affect Domestic Protections, 71 Chi. L. Rev. 223 (2004); The Law and Economics of Reverse Engineering, 111 Yale L. J. 1575 (2002); Privacy as Intellectual Property?, 52 Stan. L. Rev. 1125 (2000); Intellectual Property Rights in Data?, 50 Vand. L. Rev. 51 (1997) (co-authored with J.H. Reichman); A Manifesto Concerning the Legal Protection of Computer Programs, 94 Colum. L. Rev. 2308 (1994) (co-authored with Randall Davis, Mitchell Kapor, and J.H. Reichman); Benson Revisited: The Case Against Patent Protection for Algorithms and Other Computer Program-Related Inventions, 39 Emory L. J. 1025 (1990); and CONTU Revisited: The Case Against Copyright Protection for Computer Programs in Machine-Readable Form, 1984 Duke L. J. 663 (1984).
Since 1990, Samuelson has been a contributing editor of Communications of the ACM, a computing professionals journal respected for its coverage of existing and emerging technologies, for which she has written more than seventy “Legally Speaking” columns. From 1997 through 2002, Samuelson was a fellow of the John D. & Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation. She is also a Fellow of the Association of Computing Machinery. The Anita Borg Institute honored Samuelson with its Women of Vision Award for Social Impact in 2005, and the public interest organization Public Knowledge awarded her its IP3 Award for her contributions to Internet law and policy in October 2010. B.A., University of Hawaii (1971); M.A., University of Hawaii (1972); J.D., Yale University (1976)
Eric Schwartz
Mitchell Silberberg & Knupp; former Assistant Counsel, U.S. House of Rep.
Eric Schwartz has over 35 years of experience as a copyright attorney counseling on U.S. and foreign copyright law matters - including rights, ownership, licensing, exceptions, and enforcement issues – for emerging technological uses (e.g., social media and artificial intelligence), as well as “traditional media” in film and television, recorded sound, music publishing, book publishing, videogames, and business software. Eric has served as production counsel for numerous feature and documentary films and television programs (as well as provided fair use guidance). For several decades, he has counseled on copyright termination issues regarding the recapture and re-negotiation of rights in high-profile cases and privately in catalog sales, involving musical compositions, recordings, films, and works of the visual arts. Eric has served as an expert witness in numerous federal copyright cases, and as an appellate and trial litigation strategist, as well as assisting on Copyright Office registration and recordation practices. He is an expert on film and recorded music archival legal and preservation issues; his pro bono preservation work was featured in a 2011 Washington Post profile. He is an adjunct professor and frequent guest lecturer on copyright law and related subjects, including serving on the faculty of American University Washington College of Law, and Georgetown University Law Center.
Erik Stallman
UC Berkeley School of Law
Erik Stallman is an Assistant Clinical Professor of Law and Associate Director of the Samuelson Law, Technology & Public Policy Clinic. He is also a Faculty Co-Director of the Berkeley Center for Law & Technology. His primary interests are regulation of access to information and open internet issues.
Since 2005, Stallman has worked on intellectual property and telecommunications law and policy in Congress, the Federal Communications Commission, nongovernmental organizations, and private practice. Prior to coming to Berkeley, he served as policy counsel at Google, covering copyright, telecommunications, and media regulation. Before that, he led the Open Internet Project at the Center for Democracy & Technology (CDT), where he was also General Counsel. Earlier, he served as counsel and policy advisor to then-Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Congresswoman Zoe Lofgren at the US House of Representatives. He was also an Honors Attorney in the FCC Media Bureau and an associate at Steptoe & Johnson.
Stallman is a 2003 graduate of Berkeley Law and was as a law clerk for Judge Susan P. Graber of the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit.
Xiyin Tang
UCLA School of Law
Xiyin Tang is a Professor of Law at UCLA School of Law. She has previously served as a lead counsel for Facebook and an associate at Mayer Brown LLP and Skadden Arps Slate Meagher & Flom LLP, where she worked on a variety of transactional and litigation matters in the technology, media, and entertainment sectors.
Tang’s research focuses on the roles that technological evolution and new modes of dissemination play in the law of intellectual property. Her current research addresses how IP laws should respond to artificial intelligence and its effect on creative labor markets. Past writings have addressed the use of both public and private mechanisms—in the form of class action litigation and confidential contracts, respectively—as responses to mass digitization and, with it, potentially, mass infringement. Her publications have appeared in the Columbia Law Review, Michigan Law Review, NYU Law Review, and Yale Law Journal, among others. She is also a co-author of sections of the leading copyright law treatise Nimmer on Copyright.
Tang received her B.A. in English Literature and Creative Writing summa cum laude from Columbia University. She received her J.D. from Yale Law School, where she received the Neale M. Albert Prize for Best Paper on Art Law and twice received the Nathan Burkan Memorial Prize for Best Paper on Copyright Law. During law school, Tang served as Editor-in-Chief of the Yale Journal of Law and Technology.
Karyn Temple
Motion Picture Association; former Register of Copyrights
Karyn A. Temple is Senior Executive Vice President and Global General Counsel for the Motion Picture Association. One of the world’s leading authorities on copyright, Ms. Temple oversees all of the Association’s legal affairs and content protection efforts around the world.
Prior to joining the Motion Picture Association, Ms. Temple served more than eight years in the U.S. Copyright Office, most recently as the Register of Copyrights, where she led the 400-person agency and its eight divisions representing law, policy, international affairs, financial operations, registration practice, public records, and outreach and education. In this role, she testified multiple times before both the U.S. House of Representatives and U.S. Senate and oversaw the Office’s policy and legal activities among others.
Prior to leading the U.S. Copyright Office, Ms. Temple headed its Office of Policy and International Affairs, which includes a staff of attorneys focusing on domestic and international copyright law matters. Ms. Temple served on both U.S. delegations for the most recently adopted WIPO treaties (the Beijing Treaty on Audiovisual Performances and the Marrakesh Treaty to Facilitate Access to Public Works for Persons who are Blind, Visually Impaired or Otherwise Print Disabled). Ms. Temple also served in policy and litigation roles at the U.S. Department of Justice, most recently serving in the Obama Administration as Senior Counsel to the Deputy Attorney General of the United States.
Ms. Temple also has extensive private-sector experience. She previously served as Vice President, Litigation and Legal Affairs for the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) where she managed a wide variety of anti-piracy litigation matters on behalf of RIAA member companies. She also spent several years as a litigation associate at the prominent D.C.-based law firm Williams and Connolly LLP. Immediately after law school, Ms. Temple served as a law clerk for The Honorable Nathaniel R. Jones, U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit.
Ms. Temple has served in several prominent volunteer positions in the copyright community, including as an elected Trustee for the Copyright Society of the USA, co-chair of the International Chapter of the Copyright Society of the USA, steering committee member of the D.C. Bar Association’s Intellectual Property Law Section, and Chair of the Copyright Committee of the D.C. Bar’s IP Law Section.
Ms. Temple received her J.D. from Columbia University School of Law where she was a Harlan Fiske Stone Scholar, Senior Editor of the Columbia Law Review, and Chairperson of the Columbia Black Law Students’ Association. She received her B.A. in English from the University of Michigan.
Molly Van Houweling
UC Berkeley School of Law
Molly Shaffer Van Houweling joined the Berkeley Law faculty in fall 2005 from the University of Michigan Law School, where she had been an assistant professor since 2002. Van Houweling’s teaching and research interests include intellectual property, law and technology, property, and food law.
Van Houweling serves as a member of the Advisory Council of Creative Commons (following six years as Chair of the Board of Directors) and is a founding Director of Authors Alliance. She is an Associate Reporter on the American Law Institute’s Restatement of the Law of Copyright and an Adviser to the Restatement of the Law of Property. She served as Berkeley Law’s Associate Dean for J.D. Curriculum & Teaching from 2015-2022.
Much of Professor Van Houweling’s research focuses on copyright law’s implications for new information technologies (and vice versa). She often explores this and other intellectual property issues using theoretical and doctrinal tools borrowed from the law of tangible property. Her recent scholarly work includes “The New Private Law and Intellectual Property,” in the Oxford Handbook of the New Private Law (2020); and “Intellectual Property as Property,” in the Research Handbook on the Economics of Intellectual Property Law (2019).
In 2020, Professor Van Houweling received the campus-wide Extraordinary Teaching in Extraordinary Times Award. In 2022 she received the Law School’s Rutter Award for Teaching Distinction.
Professor Van Houweling graduated from the University of Michigan and Harvard Law School. She clerked for Judge Michael Boudin of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the First Circuit and Justice David H. Souter of the U.S. Supreme Court.
Saurabh Vishnubhakat
Cardozo School of Law
Saurabh Vishnubhakat is a Professor of Law and Director of the Intellectual Property and Information Law Program at Cardozo Law. He is also a Research Fellow at the Duke Law Center for Innovation Policy.
Professor Vishnubhakat writes and teaches in intellectual property, administrative law, federal civil procedure, and remedies, especially from an empirical perspective. His research explores the interaction of the U.S. intellectual property system with federal courts and agencies and with technology and knowledge markets.
Professor Vishnubhakat’s work has been cited in federal judicial opinions, agency rulemaking, and briefing across more than a dozen Supreme Court and Federal Circuit cases. He testified as an invited expert in the FTC’s Competition and Consumer Protection in the 21st Century hearings, and the law and economics professors’ joint comment on patent claim interpretation that he spearheaded helped shape the USPTO regulation that still remains the agency’s legal standard across multiple presidential transitions.
Before joining Cardozo Law, Professor Vishnubhakat held joint tenured appointments in law and engineering at Texas A&M University. He began his career in public service, serving as principal legal advisor to the USPTO’s first two chief economists. He was also a faculty fellow at Duke Law School, where he co-taught patent law, and was an NIH-funded postdoctoral associate at the Duke Center for Public Genomics, where he researched law and policy issues surrounding innovation in genetics and biomedicine. He is a past chair of the AALS Section on Intellectual Property and the Section on Remedies. B.S., Georgia Institute of Technology; J.D., UNH Franklin Pierce School of Law; LL.M., UNH Franklin Pierce School of Law.