THE COMEDIES OF FAIR USE

Date/Time: 28/04/2006 12:00 am

This is the last reminder to reserve a space for  THE COMEDIES OF FAIR USE
conference. This event  has now been advertised in The New Yorker  Magazine
and will be in the “weekend” events  section of Friday’s New York Times. If
you have  not already done so, call 212-998-2100, and  leave your name to
reserve a space. Keep in mind  that even with reservations, the event is
first  come, first seated. We’ll see you then!
The New York Institute for the Humanities THE COMEDIES OF FAIR USE April
28-30, 2006 All events located in: Hemmerdinger Hall, 100 Washington Square
East, New York, NY 10003
THE COMEDIES OF FAIR USE
FRIDAY, APRIL 28 7:30pm-7:45pm           Introductory remarks: Robert
Boynton
7:45pm-9:30pm          Lawrence Lessig on The Current State of Fair Use    
 
                  with responses by Allan Adler and Hugh Hansen            
 
          Siva Vaidhyanathan (moderator)
SATURDAY, APRIL 29 9:30am -10:00am    Introductory remarks: Lawrence
Weschler
(Note: Lawrence Lessig and Judge Kozinski will comment as the day
progresses)
10:00am-11:30am   Art                             Joy Garnett, Susan 
Mieselas, Art Spiegelman, Lebbeus Woods,  Carrie                        
McLaren, Joel Wachs                       Lawrence Weschler (moderator)
11:45am-1:15pm    The Permissions Maze                           Geoff Dyer,
Susan Bielstein, Allan Adler                           Robert Boynton
(moderator)
Break
2:30pm-3:15pm    Screening of short films: films  from the 826 NYC kids and
the Free Culture  remix  contest. Comments on the issues they raise by  Leon
Friedman and Charles                         Sims.
3:30pm-4:45pm      Documentary Film                           Amy Sewell,
Pat 
Aufderheide, Hugh Hansen, Errol Morris, Charles Sims                        
 
James Boyle (moderator)
5:00pm-6:30          Music                           Lawrence Ferrara, Paul
Miller (aka DJ Spooky),                           Hank Shocklee, Claudia
Gonson                           Kembrew McLeod (moderator)
SUNDAY, APRIL 30 9:30am-9:45am    Introductory remarks: Siva Vaidhyanathan
9:45am-11:15am     Now Where Are We?                         Lewis Hyde,
Jonathan Lethem, James Boyle                               Siva
Vaidhyanathan(moderator)
11:30am-1:00pm    What Is To Be Done?                         Judge
Kozinski,
Pat Aufderhide, Carrie McLaren                         Lawrence Weschler
(moderator)
                                          BIOGRAPHIES
Allan Adler is Vice President for Legal and  Governmental Affairs in the
Washington, D.C.  office of the Association of American Publishers  (AAP),
where he deals with intellectual  property, freedom of speech, new
technology,
and  other industry-related issues. Prior to that, he  variously served as
Legislative Counsel to the  American Civil Liberties Union (1981-1989), 
presenting testimony before various committees  of Congress on a broad range
of issues  concerning the public’s right to obtain and  disseminate
information; staff attorney with the  Center for National Security Studies 
(1978-1981); and Staff Director for The  Reporters Committee for Freedom of
the Press (1977-1978).
Pat Aufderheide is professor in the School of  Communication at American
University in  Washington, D.C., and the director of the Center  for Social
Media there. She is the author most  recently of The Daily Planet and of 
Communications Policy in the Public Interest.  She has served as a juror at
the Sundance Film  Festival; on the board of directors of the  Independent
Television Service, which produces  innovative television programming for 
underserved audiences under the umbrella of the  Corporation for Public
Broadcasting; and on the  editorial boards of a variety of publications, 
including Communication Law and Policy and In These Times newspaper.
Fred Benenson co-founded Free Culture @ NYU  during his senior year while he
was studying  philosophy and computer science. After  graduating in May of
2005, he worked as the Free  Culture intern at Creative Commons. In the
Fall 
of 2006, he will begin NYU’s ITP program at the Tisch School of the Arts.
Susan Bielstein is the executive acquiring  editor for art, architecture,
classics, and film  at the University of Chicago Press.  A published  writer
of fiction and nonfiction, she has just  completed a book about the
permissions culture  of our time, titled Permissions, A Survival  Guide:
Blunt
Talk about Art as Intellectual Property, forthcoming in May.
James Boyle, the William Neal Reynolds Professor  of Law at Duke Law School
and co-founder of the  Center for the Study of the Public Domain, is  the
author of Shamans, Software and Spleens: Law  and the Construction of the
Information Society,  and a Board Member of both Creative Commons  (which is
working to facilitate the free  availability of art, scholarship, and
cultural  materials by developing innovative,  machine-readable licenses
that
individuals and  institutions can attach to their work), and  Science
Commons,
which aims to expand the  Creative Commons mission into the realm of 
scientific and technical data.  His most recent  publication is Bound By
Law,
a jointly authored  comic book on fair use in documentary film.
Robert S. Boynton, the director of the graduate  magazine journalism program
at New York  University and a regular contributor to the New  York Times
Magazine, among others, is author of  The New New Journalism, and was the
co-convenor  (with Mr. Weschler) of this conference.
Inga Chernyak is a junior in the Gallatin School  of Individualized study. 
She co-founded the NYU  chapter of Free Culture in her freshman year,  and
has
been fighting the good fight ever  since.  In the future, she hopes to write
some  manner of treatise in the field of moral  philosophy, represent Fred
Benenson in the  monumental copyright suit he will inevitably  bring upon
himself, and turn down Jack Valenti  when he offers to buy her a drink.
Geoff Dyer’s many books include But Beautiful,  Paris Trance, Out of Sheer
Rage (on never quite  being able to write a book on D.H. Lawrence),  Yoga
For
People Who Can’t Be Bothered To Do It,  and, most recently, The Ongoing
Moment
(on photography). He lives in London.
Lawrence Ferrara, a pianist, music theorist, and  expert in music copyright,
is Professor of Music  at NYU, where he has been Chair of the  Department of
Music and Performing Arts for  eleven years.  In addition, he has served as
a 
frequent consultant to both plaintiffs and  defendants in music copyright
claims and in that  capacity regularly gets engaged by all of the  major
record and music publishing companies as  well as many independent entities.
Joy Garnett is a painter based in New York. She  studied at L’Ecole
Nationale
des Beaux Arts in  Paris and received her MFA from The City College  of New
York. Her work is exhibited widely in the  U.S. and abroad, and has been
reproduced in  numerous publications including Harper’s ,  Perspecta, and
Cabinet Magazine.  For more  information go to:
http://joygarnett.com Claudia Gonson is a musician
and
music manager,  who manages and plays in The Magnetic Fields.  She also
manages Stephin Merritt’s other bands,  The 6ths, Future Bible Heroes and
Gothic  Archies, and sings in Future Bible Heroes. She lives in Brooklyn New
York Hugh Hansen teaches courses in advanced  copyright law, trademark law,
EU
intellectual  property law and U.S. constitutional law at  Fordham Law
School.  He is the founder and  director of the Fordham Annual Conference
on 
International Intellectual Property Law and  Policy, author of NY
Intellectual
Property  Handbook (Lexis Nexis 2006) and editor of seven  volumes in a
series
entitled International Intellectual Property Law & Policy.
Lewis Hyde is a cultural critic with a special  interest in the public life
of
the  imagination.  His 1983 book, The Gift, is an  enquiry into the
situation
of creative artists  in a commercial society.  His more recent work, 
Trickster Makes This World (1998), is a portrait  of the the kind of
disruptive imagination needed  to keep any culture flexible and lively. A 
MacArthur fellow, Hyde is currently the Richard  L. Thomas Professor of
Creative Writing at  Kenyon College and a Fellow of the Berkman  Center for
Internet and Society at the Harvard Law School.
Judge Alex Kozinski, a graduate of the UCLA Law  School who clerked for
Supreme Court Justice  Anthony Kennedy and Chief Justice Warren Burger,  was
appointed United States Circuit Judge for  the Ninth Circuit on November
7,1985.
Lawrence Lessig, whose work can be said to have  inspired this entire
conference, is a Professor  of Law at Stanford Law School and founder of
the 
school’s Center for Internet and Society. Prior  to joining the Stanford
faculty, he was the  Berkman Professor of Law at Harvard Law School,  and a
Professor at the University of Chicago. He  clerked for Judge Richard Posner
on the 7th  Circuit Court of Appeals and Justice Antonin  Scalia on the
United
States Supreme Court.  Professor Lessig represented web site operator  Eric
Eldred in the ground-breaking case Eldred  v. Ashcroft, a challenge to the
1998 Sonny Bono  Copyright Term Extension Act. Professor Lessig  is the
author
of Free Culture (2004), The Future  of Ideas (2001) and Code and Other Laws
of  Cyberspace (1999). He chairs the Creative  Commons project, and serves
on
the board of the  Free Software Foundation, the Electronic  Frontier
Foundation, the Public Library of Science, and Public Knowledge.
Jonathan Lethem is the author of The Fortress of  Solitude and six other
novels. His fifth novel,  Motherless Brooklyn, won the National Book 
Critic’s
Circle Award and has been translated  into fifteen languages. He’s also the
author of  two collections of short stories, a collection  of essays, and a
novella, and edited The Vintage  Book of Amnesia. A recent MacArthur fellow,
he lives in Brooklyn and Maine.
Carrie McLaren is the editor and publisher of  Stay Free!, a Brooklyn-based
magazine and blog  focused on American media and consumer culture 
(www.stayfreemagazine.org). She is also the  curator of the Illegal Art
Exhibit, a multimedia  art show and website devoted to copyright  reform.
(www.illegal-art.org). A former  advertising columnist for the Village
Voice,
her  writing has also appeared in Newsday, Mother  Jones, Time Out NY, and
SPIN magazine, among others. She lives in Brooklyn.
Kembrew McLeod is an independent documentary  filmmaker and a media studies
scholar at the  University of Iowa whose work focuses on both  popular music
and the cultural impact of  intellectual property law. His books include 
Owning Culture: Authorship, Ownership and  Intellectual Property Law (2001)
and Freedom of  Expression®: Overzealous Copyright Bozos and  Other Enemies
of
Creativity (2005). Money For  Nothing: Behind the Business of Pop Music
(2000)  was McLeod’s first documentary, and he is  currently working on two
other documentaries on  free speech, fair use, and, as he puts it, 
Resistance
and Repression in the Age of Intellectual Property.
Susan Meiselas, who received her B.A. from Sarah  Lawrence College and her
M.A. in visual  education from Harvard University, joined Magnum  Photos in
1976 and has worked as a freelance  photographer since then. A MacArthur
fellow, she  is perhaps best known for her coverage of human  rights issues
in
Latin America, images from  which have been published widely throughout the 
world. Her books include Nicaragua, June  1978-July 1979 and Kurdistan: In
the
Shadow of History.