Creative Commons

Started: Jul 2004 Francesca Rodriquez is the Chief Operating Officer and Project Manager at Creative Commons. She has worked at Creative Commons since July 2004. She has worked in museum education at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the Museum of International Folk Art, The Georgia O'Keeffe Museum and The Art Institute of Chicago. Francesca holds a BA in Studio Art from the College of Santa Fe, and an MA from the University of Chicago in humanities and art history.

A 1972 graduate of Harvard Law School, Eric F. Saltzman began his career as a criminal defense attorney in Seattle's and Boston's public defender offices. While teaching in Harvard Law School's Criminal Trial Advocacy program, Saltzman took up filmmaking at MIT's renowned Film Section and re-created trials as teaching tools. Moving from re-creation to verite, Saltzman introduced cameras into actual courtrooms with The Shooting of Big Man: Anatomy of a Criminal Case (a two hour special on ABC News in 1979, now available for Creative Commons license here). For CBS News, he produced and directed Miami: The Trial That Sparked the Riots, an investigation of a police homicide, its cover-up, and the ultimate trial of the police officers. These and other films have won Emmy and ABA Silver Gavel awards, among others. In the mid-1980s, Saltzman moved into the film business and began acquiring and licensing libraries of classic motion picture and television rights for emerging media such as cable, microwave and satellite transmission. In 2000-2002, Saltzman was executive director of Harvard's Berkman Center for Internet & Society. He is a member of the bars of Washington State and the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, and on the boards of not-for-profits in the area of race and poverty and the extension of Internet services to the human rights and legal services sectors. He lives with his wife and two boys in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Started: Mar 2006 Heather Ford is a South African who has worked in the fields of internet policy, law and management in South Africa, the United Kingdom and the United States. Heather graduated from Rhodes University with a Bachelor of Journalism degree and has a certificate in Telecommunications Policy, Law and Management from the University of the Witwatersrand Link Centre. After working in the United Kingdom for Greennet and Privacy International, she went on to Stanford University in 2003 where she worked as a fellow in the Reuters Digital Vision Fellowship Program. Volunteering for Creative Commons while she was at Stanford, she decided to go back to South Africa at the end of her studies to start Creative Commons South Africa and a programme entitled 'Commons-sense: Towards an African Digital Information Commons' at the Wits University Link Centre. Recently appointed Acting Executive Director of iCommons, Heather is also helping to help establish an Intellectual Property Research Unit at the Link Centre and a new NGO called 'The African Commons Project'.

A 1972 graduate of Harvard Law School, Eric F. Saltzman began his career as a criminal defense attorney in Seattle's and Boston's public defender offices. While teaching in Harvard Law School's Criminal Trial Advocacy program, Saltzman took up filmmaking at MIT's Film Section and re-creating trials as teaching tools. Moving from re-creation to verite, Saltzman introduced cameras into actual courtrooms with The Shooting of Big Man: Anatomy of a Criminal Case (a two hour special on ABC News in 1979). For CBS News, he produced and directed Miami: The Trial That Sparked the Riots, an investigation of a policekilling, its cover-up, and the ultimate trial of the police officers. These and other films won Emmy and ABA Silver Gavel awards, among others. In the mid-1980s, Saltzman entered the the film business, acquiring and licensing libraries of classic motion picture and television programs for then emerging media such as cable, microwave and satellite transmission. In 2000-2002, Saltzman was executive director of Harvard's Berkman Center for Internet & Society. He is a member of the bars of Washington State and the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, and on the boards of not-for-profits in the area of race and poverty and the extension of Internet services to the human rights and legal services sectors, He is a founder and board member of Creative Commons. He lives with his wife and two boys in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Lisa Rein is the Digital Librarian for the Timothy Leary Futique Trust. The Trust is currently in the process of fulfilling Tim's dream of digitizing his personal archives and making them searchable and accessible online. Lisa was the Text and Graphics Editor for one of Tim's last published works, the graphic novel "Surfing the Conscious Nets." She is a co-founder of Creative Commons, and was its first CTO. She received her BA and MA from San Francisco State's Broadcast Communication Electronic Arts Department, and is a frequent lecturer there on copyright, fair use, social networking, web media and culture, digital archiving, virtual worlds and artificial intelligence.

Davis Guggenheim is a director and producer of both documentary and dramatic film and television. In 1999, he undertook an ambitious project documenting the challenging first year of several novice public school teachers. Two films resulted from this intensive immersion in the Los Angeles public school system: The First Year and Teach. Both films sought to address the tremendous need for qualified teachers in California and nationwide and to create awareness of the crisis as well as to inspire a new generation to become teachers. Davis was an Executive Producer on Training Day and directed a feature film called Gossip, both for Warner Bros. His television directing credits include recently completed episodes of "The Shield," "Alias" and "24 as well as such critically acclaimed programs as "NYPD Blue," "ER," and "Party of Five." He is currently a Producer and Director of the upcoming HBO series "Deadwood." Guggenheim's other documentary films include Norton Simon: A Man and His Art, produced for permanent exhibition at the Norton Simon Museum, and JFK and the Imprisoned Child, produced for permanent exhibition at the John F. Kennedy Library. Guggenheim wrote and edited many films with his father, four-time Academy Award winner Charles Guggenheim. Davis graduated from Brown University in 1986.

Started: Nov 2005 Eric develops Creative Commons' culture and education projects. He is a contributing editor for Wired and has written for the Fader, Soma, and Urb. He is the co-founder of the Sneakmove record label and makes music as one half of Meanest Man Contest.

Jennifer Yip comes to Creative Commons from the ole' midwest. She graduated from the University of Michigan with a Bachelors' degree in Anthropology. After continuing to work for the University of Michigan Health System, she decided to leave the land of seven-month coldness and now enjoys San Francisco's plethora of restaurants, shopping, museums, and live performance.

Donatella has got a background of ten years' experience in Arab media research. In 2000 she wrote her first book on Arab satellite channels, "Media Oriente", followed in 2005 by a monography on Al Jazeera. She was advisor of Centre de Cultura Contemporania de Barcelona for the art exhibition "Occidente desde Oriente" in 2005 and she created "West by the Arab media", a two day festival of screenings and debates on how Arab TV channels picture the "West", launched in 2008 in Rome and to be held in 2009 in Brussels. She has lectured on Arab media in many events held, among the others, in MIP TV Cannes Market, Brussels' EU Parliament, Linz Ars Electronica, Aula 06. She loves Arabic language and goes crazy for musalsalat, especially those dubbed in Syrian dialect. She leaves somewhere between Rome and the Arab world.

Kaitlin joins the Creative Commons team as the Office and Project Manager of Science Commons. A Rochester, New York native, Kaitlin comes to Science Commons with a background deeply rooted in news and policy. She most recently has been working as the communications coordinator for MIT iCampus, a research alliance between the university and Microsoft, centered on education technology. She also spent time working as a journalism intern for Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press in Arlington, VA. Prior to that, Kaitlin worked as a correspondent for The Boston Globe's City/Region section from June 2004 through August 2005. Kaitlin did her undergraduate work at Northeastern University, where she received two degrees one in journalism and the other in political science.

Michelle holds a B.A. in Critical Social Thought and German Studies from Mount Holyoke College, where she completed an honors thesis on authorship, originality, and American copyright law. Keen to fuse theory with praxis, Michelle co-organizes the Berlin salon series Openeverything Fokus and free-content scavenger hunt, Wikis Take Berlin. Michelle has also studied at the University of Leipzig, and following her pledge to learn a language every decade, she is currently pursuing courses in Arabic. An avid scholar-athlete, Michelle co-founded an international soccer team and played for several seasons on the European Olympic Development Team. Despite many relocations, she still calls Heidelberg, Germany home.

Alex Kozak is a 2009 graduate of UC Berkeley with a B.A. in Philosophy. At Berkeley he developed an interest in the philosophy of science and scientific confirmation, leading him to co-found Students for Free Culture at Berkeley (host of the 2008 Free Culture conference) and become Editor-in-Chief of the Harvest Moon Undergraduate Philosophy Journal. While Alex's main passion is using technology to advance knowledge and enable education, he is also a musician, Pd and Max/MSP designer, sci-fi reader, and a big fan of the comma.

Started: Nov 2005 Alex Roberts is the graphic designer for Creative Commons, in charge of graphics on the web and in print. He graduated from the Art Institute of California San Francisco, and brings with him many years of experience in the open source, and design fields. Originally from England, he now lives in San Francisco, enjoying photography and developing open source software.

Andrew Rens BA, LLB, LLM (Wits) is qualified as an attorney with rights of appearance in the High Court of South Africa. He has worked for a commercial legal practise, the CCMA (a government labor dispute resolution body), as a human rights lawyer at the Wits law Clinic, and has taught Intellectual Property, Telecommunications and Media law at the University of the Witwatersrand Law School where he created a course in Internet Law.

Andy Brooks is a research assistant for the ccLearn division of Creative Commons. Andy returns to CC after graduating from SF State where he studied new media. When not liberating educational materials, Andy can be found starting up random web projects, studying the law, and/or watching hours upon hours of professional wrestling footage stored on his MythTV media computer.

Started: Oct 2006 Catharina studied law in Germany and graduated from the University of Kiel and the Hamburg Court of Appeal with the first and second state examination. While studying she obtained a scholarship from the Max-Planck-Institute for Foreign and International Patent, Copyright and Competition Law in Munich to write her PhD thesis on the History of the German Copyright Act of 1965. During the legal preparatory service she worked for several German Courts, the German Patent Office and the Canadian German Chamber of Industry and Commerce in Toronto. After finishing her legal education, Catharina worked for the law firm Shearman & Sterling LLP in their Munich office. Afterwards she spent three months at the Institute of Intellectual Property in Tokyo where she did research and taught design protection and copyright law.

Started: APR 2006 Daniela Faris joined iCommons after graduating with a Bachelor of Journalism degree from Rhodes University in South Africa. As part of her studies she undertook an intensive course in 'New Media', at the Rhodes School of Journalism and Media Studies' New Media Lab. Daniela has experience in design and layout, photography, basic web development and online publishing. She has also specialized in ICT and economics writing. She has reported on various conferences and events, including the Creative Commons South Africa launch and the Grahamstown National Arts Festival, as part of her practical training in multimedia journalism. Daniela has completed short internships at a locally based newspaper and magazine; and at the Institute for Democracy in South Africa (Idasa), a politically focused NGO in Pretoria.

Started: 2001 Diane Cabell, the Secretary and Corporate Counsel for Creative Commons, was the founder of the Clinical Program in Cyberlaw at the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard Law School. She is a co-director of Chlling Effects and sits on the advisory boards of the Canadian Internet Policy and Public Interest Clinic (CIPPIC) at University of Ottawa and the Center for Law and Innovation at the University of Maine School of Law.

Donna Wentworth joins Creative Commons as a Communications Specialist. She has spent a decade writing about the legal and technological developments shaping the Internet. An affiliate of Harvard University's Berkman Center for Internet & Society, Donna helped forge the organization's voice from its infancy in 1997. In addition to writing the Berkman Center's newsletter, she "live-blogged" several iterations of its flagship iLAW conference. Inspired by what she learned, she created Copyfight: the Politics of IP, a Corante weblog column exploring copyright and innovation. From Sept. 2003 - Oct. 2005, she was a web writer/activist for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, where she launched and edited Deep Links, the staff weblog. Since 2005, she has been working as a writer for Google, focusing primarily on communications surrounding Google Book Search. She has spoken about weblogs and why they matter at Yale and Berkeley.

Started: Jul 2004 Elaine Adolfo is the assistant for Lawrence Lessig and Creative Commons. After graduating from UC Berkeley with a degree in English Literature, she worked as a web producer for CMP, Beatnik, Macromedia and Apple. She's written music and feature stories for college papers and LA Weekly. She also won an award from Rolling Stone magazine for a story she wrote on the horrors of finding dates on the Internet. She has a really cool dog named Mr. Bojangles.

Started: Sept 2005 Eva is the Executive Assistant to Christiane Henckel von Donnersmarck and Creative Commons International. After a 3-year apprenticeship at a German automotive supplier she started to work as an Assistant at the CDU party headquarter in Bonn. She also worked several years for a member of the German parliament. Her last position was the Executive Assistance to the President of a governmental agency, which tries to attract foreign investors to eastern Germany. She has a lot of experience in administration, data management and communication. Eva also holds a teaching certificate for office administration and time management.

Director Jesse Dylan has been behind some of the most successful campaigns in commercial television, print, and interactive advertising. His most recent projects include the Emmy Award winning video YES WE CAN SONG, inspired by Barack Obama. Additionally, he is creating media projects for a diverse group of organizations including (RED), the campaign to fight AIDS in Africa, and KIVA a non-profit micro-lending organization dedicated to alleviating poverty. Current projects also include a short promotional film with Archbishop Desmond Tutu on reconciliation, and a short film exploring innovation at Harvard Medical School. Jesse's non-profit work includes his organization Lybba, a website that aims to be the world's resource for healing by providing an evidenced-based platform for people to find clear, comprehensive and easily accessible information regarding health.

John Doig joins the Creative Commons team as a Software Engineer. Originally from Raleigh, North Carolina, John graduated with a B.S. in Computer Science. His interests include open-source software, graphic design, local music, and riding BMX.

Lila comes to ccLearn from Wilson Sonsini Goodrich & Rosati, where she practiced Internet-related litigation and counseling, focusing on novel copyright and privacy issues. She previously worked for the Seattle-based law firm Perkins Coie, where she devoted significant energy to her pro bono work for the Internet Archive. Lila was also an Intellectual Property Fellow with the Electronic Frontier Foundation in 2007. She earned her Juris Doctor at the University of California, Berkeley School of Law (Boalt Hall) and holds a BA degree in philosophy from Brown University.

Started: Mar 2005 As General Counsel, Mia oversees implementation of the domestic and international legal strategy for Creative Commons and advises on ongoing legal issues that arise in relation to Creative Commons licenses and activities. Mia joined Creative Commons after working in the Silicon Valley office of the law firm Simpson Thatcher and Bartlett on a range of shareholder and securities, antitrust and intellectual property litigation matters. Prior this, Mia completed a Masters of Law at Stanford, specializing in Law, Science, and Technology, to deepen her knowledge of IP and technology issues. Before her Stanford studies, Mia worked as an IP associate in the Sydney office of Gilbert & Tobin Lawyers. Throughout her legal career, Mia has regularly acted on a pro bono basis for individual creators, giving them legal advice on IP and related issues. Mia has also written numerous articles on current issues in IP and technology law and presented frequently on these issues. Mia received a Bachelor of Arts and a Bachelor of Laws from the University of New South Wales in 1998 and her Masters of Law from Stanford Law School in 2003. She is admitted to practice in New South Wales, Australia, and in California, US.

Michael Carroll is an Assistant Professor of Law at the Villanova University School of Law, where he teaches courses on intellectual property and the law of the Internet. Prior to joining the faculty in 2001, Professor Carroll was an attorney in the Washington, D.C. office of Wilmer, Cutler & Pickering. His practice focused on intellectual property and Internet-related issues. Carroll received his A.B. with general honors from the University of Chicago and his J.D. magna cum laude from the Georgetown University Law Center. He also served as a law clerk to Judge Judith W. Rogers of the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit and Judge Joyce Hens Green of the United States District Court for the District of Columbia. Before attending law school, Carroll worked as a journalist, a high school teacher in Zimbabwe, and a program officer for democracy and governance projects in Africa.

Neeru is currently a doctoral candidate at Harvard Business School. Neeru researches consumer behavior, ethics, and decision-making. Neeru is also the founder and director of the AcaWiki project. AcaWiki collects and hosts summaries of academic papers to improve physical, and intellectual access to cutting-edge research.

As a Science Commons Fellow, Puneet intends to evangelize open access to geospatial data, science and technology. His interest in open access stems from his stint as a Science Policy Fellow at the National Academies, and as an elected Charter member of the Open Source GeoSpatial Foundation. Puneet has worked as an engineer in a small New Delhi NGO, internationally as a GIS specialist at the World Bank in Washington DC, and at a private GIS consulting firm in Madison. Puneet has an engineering degree from the Indian Institute of Technology, New Delhi, and a Masters from the University of Wisconsin-Madison where he is currently enrolled in a doctoral program researching on the nexus of public policy, geospatial information and entrepreneurship. He is also working at the UW-Madison Forestry Department helping build a completely open web-based application for modeling biome-level carbon sequestration.

Started: March 2006. As Counsel for Science Commons, Thinh is responsible for advising on legal issues relating to Science Commons and for implementing its strategy and operations. Thinh joined Science Commons after working as licensing attorney, and then corporate counsel, for Business Objects, a maker of business intelligence and reporting software. He also worked as licensing attorney for Crystal Decisions, Inc., prior to its acquisition by Business Objects. Before that, he practiced as an associate in the Technology Transactions Group of Wilson, Sonsini, Goodrich & Rosati, a Silicon Valley law firm, where his work focused mainly on licensing transactions involving strategic collaborations and joint ventures, particularly in life sciences. Thinh received a Bachelor of Arts in chemistry from Harvard University in 1996 and a J.D. from Harvard Law School in 1999. He is admitted to practice in California.

As a scientist and software engineer, Tony Loeser has been working with knowledge representation and reasoning technologies since 1996. His experience with biological data comes from six years at Ingenuity Systems, a pioneer in biology knowledge engineering. At Ingenuity, he built the initial version of the knowledge base system, query tool, and optimizer. Tony was responsible for the architecture of the ontology-based infrastructure, the pathways analysis product, and the Ingenuity knowledge base content. He is also the Lead Knowledge Architect at Science Commons, a project of Creative Commons, where he is helping to build an open source knowledge management system for biomedical research. Other posts include a year as a computer scientist at the Kestrel Institute, studying applications of formal methods to software engineering. Most recently, Tony was the vice president of engineering at Tumri Inc., applying semantic technology to their targeted internet advertising network. He delivered products from offices in California and India, managed customers in Europe, and built the company's data center infrastructure. As a graduate student, Tony spent two years at Stanford's Knowledge Systems Lab studying ontology-based simulation. He received an MS in Computer Science from Stanford, as well as a PhD in Physics with a thesis about experimental evidence for mechanisms of high-temperature superconductivity. Tony has an AB in Physics and Mathematics from Harvard.

Victoria is a fellow with the Internet and Democracy Project at the Berkman Center at Harvard Law School. She obtained a Master's in Legal Studies in 2007 from Stanford Law School where she worked with Larry Lessig to create a new license for computational research. Her current research includes understanding how new technologies and open source standards affect societal decision-making and welfare. Victoria completed her PhD in statistics at Stanford University in 2006 with advisor David Donoho, specializing in regression techniques for cases where there are many more variables than observations. She also has a Master's and a Bachelor's degree in Economics from the University of British Columbia and the University of Ottawa respectively.

Hal Abelson (April 21, 1909, Ada, Ohio - October 22, 1994, Tiburon, California) is the Class of 1992 Professor of Computer Science and Engineering at the MIT, and a fellow of the IEEE. He holds an A.B. degree from Princeton University and a Ph.D. degree in mathematics from MIT.

Jimmy Wales founded Wikipedia.org in 2001 with the philosophy: "Imagine a world in which every single person on the planet is given free access to the sum of all human knowledge." In the years since, he has devoted his life to that goal. In the process, he pioneered the collaborative Web 2.0 model. Wikipedia currently has over 2 million articles and is consistently in the top ten websites visited worldwide. In 2004, Wales founded Wikia.com to expand beyond Wikipedia to more general online communities and collaborative projects. In 2005 Wales was appointed as a fellow of the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard Law School and is a member of the Board of Directors of Creative Commons. In 2006 he was named one of Time magazine's 100 most influential people in the world.

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