Darklight Perspectives Conference 17th November 2001 Speakers
Biography's
Lawrence
Lessig : Ian
Clarke : Joshua
Davis: John
Perry Barlow: Paul
Largan
Lawrence Lessig: is
a Professor of Law at the Stanford Law School. He graduated
from Yale Law School in 1989, and then clerked for Judge
Richard Posner of the 7th Circuit Court of Appeals, and
Justice Antonin Scalia on the Supreme Court. From 1991 to
1997, he was a professor at the University of Chicago Law
School. He then became the Berkman Professor of Law at Harvard
Law School. In 1999-2000, he was a fellow at the Wissenschaftskolleg
zu Berlin before moving to Stanford in 2000.
Lessig teaches and writes in the areas of
constitutional law, contracts, comparative constitutional
law, and the law of cyberspace. His book, Code, and Other
Laws of Cyberspace, was published by Basic Books, and his
newest book, The Future of Ideas: The Fate of the Commons
in a Connected World, will be published by Random House
in November, 2001.
Professor Lawrence Lessig teaches and writes
in the areas of constitutional law, contracts, comparative
constitutional law, and the law of cyberspace. His book,
Code, and Other Laws of Cyberspace, is published by Basic
Books. In 1999-2000, he was a fellow at the Wissenschaftskolleg
zu Berlin.
Lessig is perhaps the most prominent legal
thinker on the intersection of the law and the Internet
Lessig's scholarship has been the subject
of widespread debate, particularly following the release
last year of his book Code and Other Laws of Cyberspace.
The book explores how the architecture of computer networks
affects basic liberties, and the implications of the use
of code to either suppress or promote freedom. Mark A. Lemley,
a professor at Berkeley's Boalt Hall Law School, said Code
". . . may be the most important book ever published about
the Internet . . ."
Lessig sided with the Net music-swapping
service Napster Inc. in its doomed court battle against
the record companies, which sued for copyright violations.
He backed hackers who posted code on the Web that let people
duplicate movie DVDs. The judge heeded him when he supported
the US government in its antitrust case against Microsoft
Corp
Lessig argues that legal mistakes, such as
overly strong interpretations of intellectual-property law,
favor established players at the expense of innovators and
upstarts. He wants to restructure intellectual-property
rules so that ideas are more quickly released into an intellectual
commons where others can improve upon them.
He has been involved in a similar event in
Harvard, the "Signal to Noise" conference which brought
the creative community together with the lawyers and policy
makers in order to explore the issues related to regulation,
ownership and control of online content.
http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/lessigbio.html
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Ian Clarke: Ian Clarke is the architect
and coordinator of The
Freenet Project, and the Chief Technology Officer of
Uprizer inc, a company he founded
to realise commercial applications for the Freenet technology.
Ian holds a degree in Artificial Intelligence and Computer
Science from Edinburgh University,
Scotland. He has worked as a consultant for a number of
companies including 3Com, and Logica UK's Space Division. He is
originally from County Meath, Ireland.
Freenet: Clarke has been acknowledged
as one of the most influential figures involved in the Internet.
He has created a program called Freenet.
Freenet was developed in July 1999 while
Clarke was a student of artificial intelligence and computer
science at the University of Edinburgh. In a paper he wrote
for a class, he came up with a design for a distributed
file-sharing network, in which all users can be anonymous,
or not, according to their choice. He put his idea out on
the Internet, and contributors from around the world were
allowed to tweak and improve on it. Freenet was finally
released on the Internet in March 2000.
Like the name implies, Freenet is all about
making, and keeping, information free. It's a distributed
file-sharing network, where all users are completely anonymous
and there's no central distribution server -- which means
no master list of users, no one to sue, and no way to shut
it down. The Napster court case immediately brought Clarke's
Freenet into the limelight. Here was a system that Internet
and more particularly copyright laws could not touch. Clarke
has built the seeds of a radically new Internet
With the implications of Freenet becoming
clearer to the digital world, Clarke is now an oft quoted
commentator on issues of free speech, piracy, copyright
and how creative content should be distributed online.
http://freenet.sourceforge.net/
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Joshua Davis: has been called "the
best web designer in the world"
He is one of the first examples of an artist
who has adopted the tenets of the open source movement favoured
by the software movement. Opensource has revolutionised
the way we view ownership of content on the Internet. It
allows for the sharing rather than the monopolisation of
ideas. Davis' Flash animation design techniques are online
and accessible allowing other artists to learn from his
efforts and ultimately progress their own ideas.
He runs - http://www.praystation.com/
a one-man research and development web-site. Its objective
is "to apply design and technology into a collection of
small, sometimes daily, modules - is incubating a lifestyle,
a mentality, living with anomalies (1 : deviation from the
common rule : IRREGULARITY; 2 : something different, abnormal,
peculiar, or not easily classified), producing work in a
world that is under constant flux and change."
He is also the sole creator of http://www.once-upon-a-forest.com/
- which is the nemesis of what we perceive the web to be.
No easy, short domain name. No easy to use navigation. No
instructions. No Faq's. No Ads, No Links, No Tech Support.
No Help. No Answers.
A good amount of time is spent trying to
- Unite : Communicate : Explore - on http://www.dreamless.org/ -"
where we cannot continue to grow in the field of design
and technology acting independent - We must combine forces,
and relinquish our interpretations about what does and doesn't
work. Understand that knowing where to buy bricks does not
mean you know how to build a house."
When not working on his five websites, Davis
works as senior design technologist at Kioken--the Manhattan
web design company that made waves on CNN last spring for
"firing" Sony as a client.
John Perry Barlow
Born, Jackson Hole, Wyoming October 3, 1947
John Perry Barlow is a former Wyoming rancher and Grateful
Dead lyricist. He graduated in 1969 with High Honors in
comparative religion from Wesleyan University in Middletown,
Connecticut.
More recently, he co-founded and still co-chairs
the Electronic Frontier Foundation. He was the first to
apply the term Cyberspace to the "place" it presently describes.
He has written for a diversity of publications,
including Communications of the ACM, Mondo 2000, The New
York Times, and Time. He has been on the masthead of Wired
Magazine since it was founded. His piece on the future of
copyright, "The Economy of Ideas" is taught in many law
schools and his "Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace"
is posted on thousands of web sites.
In 1997, he was a Fellow at Harvard's Institute
of Politics and has been, since 1998, as a Berkman Fellow
at the Harvard Law School.
He works actively with several consulting
groups, including Diamond Technology Partners, Vanguard,
and Global Business Network.
In June 1999, FutureBanker Magazine named
him "One of the 25 Most Influential People in Financial
Services He writes, speaks, and consults on a broad variety
of subjects, particularly digital economy.
He lives in Wyoming, New York, San Francisco,
On the Road, and in Cyberspace. He has three teenaged daughters
and aspires to be a good ancestor.
Paul Largan
Film and multi-media production company working in UK, Republic
of Ireland and USA. The company develops film projects with
acclaimed directors Patrick Jolley and Hugh McGrory. In
receipt of funding from Irish Film Board and NIFC (Northern
Ireland Film Commission). Past experience from Paul Largan
includes Producing/Executive Producing 26 short films with
an average budget of £25,000 for NIFC, British Screen, BBC.
The company has received funding for the
BanDigital screening series from amongst others: BBC NI,
Department of Culture, Arts & Leisure NI, LEDU, Northern
Irish Tourist Board, Training for Women Network, Belfast
City Council. This evolved as the online-promtotional-arm
for the 'Made in Northern Ireland' screening series 1999-2000
in USA, hosted by Irish actors Liam Neeson, Orla Brady and
Colin Farrell. This new innovative and forward thinking
project has been created to promote, network and distribute
Ireland's filmmakers and creative industries on a world
stage. The website is currently broadcasting the Apache-Tribe
digital music video initiative which received it's US premiere
on October 22nd in New York as part of Bandigital's current
screening initiative in New York, Boston and Park City,
Utah. Film program includes new cutting edge Irish film,
documentary and Alan Clarke's Northern Irish classics, 'Elephant'
and 'Contact' with the support of BBC NI...
Bandigital.com
Email: paul@bandigital.com