Rebecca Blake
Rebecca Blake is Advocacy Liaison for the Graphic Artists Guild, a professional community whose primary purpose is to help graphic artists and other design professions to build and maintain successful careers. Aside from her role as the Guild’s Advocacy Liaison, Rebecca works, sleeps, eats, and lives as Design Director at Optimum Design & Consulting, a small designer firm in mid-town Manhattan. There she oversees the creation of a wide range of print and web projects, including marketing materials, logos and corporate ID, website interfaces, and publications.
Having graduated from college with a degree completely unrelated to the visual arts, Rebecca transitioned to a design career by attending the Continuing Education Department at the School of Visual Arts. Her first act upon changing careers was to join the Graphic Artists Guild, where she met a community of supportive and sensible mentors and colleagues. She became active on the local level, serving in various positions on the New York Chapter board, before moving up to the National Board.
Maria Bustillos
Maria Bustillos is a journalist, editor and information activist. In 2017 she founded Popula, under the auspices of Civil, an experiment in using cryptocurrency for journalism, and subsequently the Brick House, an ad-free, subscription-based journalism cooperative. She was the Columbia Journalism Review’s public editor for MSNBC, and her writing has also appeared in the New York Times, The Nation, The New Yorker, Eater, Coindesk, Harper’s, Aeon, Gawker, The Awl, The Paris Review, The Guardian, and elsewhere; recently her work has focused on media, blockchain, copyright, and other issues related to the intersection of digital publishing and journalism. As founder of the Brick House she spearheaded the development of Briet, a platform and marketplace to enable publishers to sell digital books outright to libraries, providing an alternative to the licensing model increasingly favored by big publishing.
Ben Colman
Ben Colman is the Co-Founder and CEO of Reality Defender (www.realitydefender.com), the leading deepfake detection platform for enterprise and government users. Over the past 15 years, Ben has scaled multiple companies at the intersection of cybersecurity and data science. Prior to this, Ben led cybersecurity commercialization at Goldman Sachs and worked at Google. He holds an MBA from NYU Stern and a bachelor’s degree from Claremont McKenna College.
Giuseppina D’Agostino
Pina D’Agostino is a law professor, lawyer, public speaker, board director and internationally-recognized scholar at Osgoode Hall Law School, York University specializing in intellectual property (IP), emerging technologies and innovation law and policy. She has been recently appointed as the inaugural co-Director of the new Centre for AI & Society, York University. She joined Osgoode Hall in 2006 and is regularly called by Canadian and international governments for advice, has testified before the Canadian Parliament, is a widely published author, regularly serves as a consultant and is a cited authority at the Supreme Court of Canada and in various media. Her latest book Leading Legal Disruption: Artificial Intelligence and a Toolkit for Lawyers and the Law (Thomson Reuters 2021) has been well-received and she serves as the Editor-in-Chief for the Intellectual Property Journal. In 2022 she has been recognized as the Top 25 Most Influential Lawyers in Canada by Canadian Lawyer Magazine and Top 5 in Business Law.
She holds a MSt and DPhil (University of Oxford) with distinction in copyright law, an LLB (Osgoode Hall Law School), an HonBA, summa cum laude, in English and Political Science and a specialization in French (York University), holds an ICD.D from the Rotman School of Management (University of Toronto) and is a member of the Law Society of Ontario (2001 call).
Judith Germano
Judith Germano is an attorney, academic, entrepreneur and former federal prosecutor with deep
expertise in cybersecurity, data privacy, complex federal fraud and regulatory-compliance matters, as well as enterprise risk management and organizational communication. Judi is the founder and lead counsel of the boutique law firm GermanoLaw LLC, advising and representing clients on cybersecurity governance, incident response, regulatory compliance, civil and criminal investigations, and risk management. GermanoLaw is 100% women owned and operated, with clients ranging from Fortune 50 to startup organizations, as well as boards and individual executives.
Judi is a Distinguished Fellow and Professor at NYU’s Center for Cybersecurity (CCS), Senior Fellow at NYU’s Center on Law & Security, an Adjunct Professor of Law at NYU School of Law, and Adjunct Professor at NYU Stern School of Business. Judi is an Expert Industry Advisor of TruePic, serves on the National Advisory Board of the Advanced CyberSecurity Center (ACSC), is a Faculty Board Member of the Volatility and Risk Institute at NYU, and is Board President and a co-founder of FAME GC (Friends of Arts & Music Enrichment, GC), a non-profit created to support music and arts education and opportunity in K-12 public schools.
Judi previously was Chief of Economic Crimes at the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the District of New Jersey where she supervised and prosecuted complex criminal cases of national and international impact, involving cybercrime, securities and other financial fraud, identity theft, corruption, export enforcement and national security. Before joining the U.S. Attorney’s Office, Judi worked at the global law firm Shearman & Sterling, and served as a law clerk to the Honorable Joseph M. McLaughlin of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit, and the Honorable Dominic J. Squatrito of the U.S. District Court for the District of Connecticut.
Aleksander Goranin
Aleksander Goranin is a software copyright and patent litigator, specializing in intellectual property- and technology-driven cases. He is a core member of Duane Morris’s Technology Media & Telecom practice and a lead of its Artificial Intelligence working group. Mr. Goranin regularly represents prominent enterprise software, web, and telecom companies both in the courtroom and at the negotiating table. In addition to trial work, Mr. Goranin also regularly advises technology clients with web- and data-centric business models on issues concerning proper data acquisition, data use, data ownership, software and data licensing, and potential online intermediary liability, section 230, and DMCA implications. Alex is active in the leadership of The Copyright Society and co-chairs its AI Series of CLE programming. He started his legal career clerking for then Chief Judge Edward Becker of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit.
Lisa Janicke Hinchliffe
Lisa Janicke Hinchliffe is Professor/Coordinator for Research and Teaching Professional Development in the University Library at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. She is also an affiliate faculty member in the University’s School of Information Sciences, European Union Center, and Center for Global Studies. Lisa is currently the Chair of the ORCID Board and writes for The Scholarly Kitchen. For more info see https://lisahinchliffe.com.
Yacine Jernite
Dr. Yacine Jernite is Machine Learning and Society Lead at Hugging Face, an AI platform and community dedicated to developing and sharing open source machine learning models and datasets, including a notable code library for building transformer models for natural language processing and BLOOM, a multilingual large language model with 176 billion parameters. At Hugging Face, Dr. Jernite works on ML systems governance at the intersection of regulatory and technical tools. Dr. Jernite received a masters degree in applied mathematics from the Ecole Normale Superiere in France, a Ph.D. in computer science from NYU’s Courant Institute of Mathematical Science, and was a postdoctoral researcher at FAIR, Facebook’s Artificial Intelligence Research group, working on unsupervised text summarization, long form question answering, and natural language interactions between human and machine.
Gia Jung
Gia Jung is an associate at Cotchett, Pitre & McCarthy LLP. She specializes in complex commercial litigation and class actions. Gia received her J.D. from University of California, Berkeley School of Law, with a certificate in IP & Technology Law. Prior to joining CPM, Gia represented tech clients in commercial litigation, consumer class actions, and trade secret matters. Her practice reflects her longstanding interest in technology and AI.
Christopher Kenneally
Christopher Kenneally is Senior Director, Content Marketing at Copyright Clearance Center (CCC), where he develops content and programming covering publishing and research. He is host of Velocity of Content, a twice-weekly podcast from CCC. As an independent journalist, he has written for the New York Times, Boston Globe, and many other publications. He has also reported for WBUR-FM (Boston), National Public Radio, and WGBH-TV (PBS-Boston). He is author of Massachusetts 101 and The Massachusetts Legacy.
Vejay Lalla
Vejay Lalla is a Partner in Technology Transactions at Fenwick and West. He is Co-Lead of the firm’s Digital Media & Entertainment, Consumer Technologies & Retail practice.
Vejay helps clients navigate the convergence of technology, advertising, media, e-commerce and entertainment, and advises on the potential impact for his clients from a commercial, intellectual property, regulatory and privacy standpoint. He regularly advises companies across numerous industries, including artificial intelligence and machine learning, media-tech, marketing-tech, blockchain, fintech, proptech, augmented and virtual reality, gaming, fashion, retail, beauty and consumer product companies over their entire lifecycle. Particularly, he counsels companies on structuring, drafting and negotiating complex strategic technology and license agreements, including SaaS, software, technology development and hosting agreements, strategic alliances, data licenses, enterprise and other similar technology transactions or customer partnerships.
He has a B.A. from Boston University and a law degree from the Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law.
Claire Leibowicz
Claire Leibowicz is the Head of the AI and Media Integrity Program at the Partnership on AI (PAI), where she has worked since the organization’s inception. She also oversees PAI’s AI and Media Integrity Steering Committee. Before launching the AI and Media Integrity Program, Claire worked to develop and lead all of PAI’s Program Areas, including those focused on AI safety, the future of work, human-AI collaboration, and fairness, transparency, and accountability challenges.
In 2021, Claire was a Journalism Fellow at Tablet Magazine, and in 2022 she was a Fellow at The Rockefeller Foundation’s Bellagio Center focused on AI governance. Claire’s insights have appeared in publications such as Axios, Consumer Reports, WIRED, and The Hill, and she has advised companies, governments, and nonprofit organizations on AI governance, generative media, and digital information.
Claire holds a BA in Psychology and Computer Science from Harvard, and a master’s degree from Oxford, where she studied as a Clarendon Scholar (and is now pursuing her PhD part-time).
David Leichtman
David Leichtman is the Managing Partner of Leichtman Law PLLC. David has tried a variety of complex matters in federal and state courts around the country. The types of matters he handles include copyright, patent, trade secret and trademark cases, as well as other kinds of business litigation involving contracts, fraud, and other business torts. A substantial part of his firm’s practice involves the representation of individual artists.
David serves on the Executive Committee of the Board of Directors for Volunteer Lawyers For The Arts, where he was the Chair for nine years and is now Chair Emeritus. He also serves on the national advisory boards of the Kernochan Center For Law, Media & The Arts at Columbia Law School, and is a member of the board of director of the University of Michigan’s University Musical Society. David holds a BA from Columbia, an MA in Theater History from Hunter College, and a JD from Columbia Law School.
Diana Pfeil
Diana Pfeil is Chief Technology Officer at Pex, the trusted global leader in digital rights technology. She is an established leader in engineering and machine learning/AI with over 15 years of experience building data products for both enterprise and startup companies. Prior to Pex, she held roles at Amazon, PayPal, and several startups focusing on e-commerce, recommendation systems, lending and financial services, travel, and responsible AI efforts.
Diana holds a PhD in Operations Research from MIT. She has a passion for the data community, and has been heavily involved in the machine learning community as an event organizer, speaker, and adjunct professor teaching predictive modeling at CU Denver.
Bill Rosenblatt
Bill Rosenblatt is the program chair and co-producer of the Copyright and Technology conference, and a Trustee of the Copyright Society. He is a globally recognized authority on technology issues pertaining to copyright and content in the digital age. He has contributed to standards initiatives related to content identification, metadata, and rights. Bill has served as an expert witness in litigations related to copyright, digital media, security, and music business issues in the US, Canada, and Europe. He has testified in federal court, the Copyright Royalty Board, and the International Trade Commission. He has also testified before and advised public policy entities worldwide on digital copyright and technology issues.
Bill is an adjunct professor in the Music and Performing Arts Professions department at NYU. He is author of the book Digital Rights Management: Business and Technology (Wiley) and co-author (with Howie Singer) of Key Changes: The Ten Times Technology Transformed the Music Industry (Oxford University Press). He has written for Forbes, Publishers Weekly, and other publications, and he has spoken at events ranging from Practising Law Institute panels in NYC to the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland.
Bill is not a lawyer but he sometimes plays one on TV; and he plays guitar in the Copyright Society house band Crude Humble & Obvious. He holds a B.S.E. in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science from Princeton University and an M.S. in Computer and Information Science from the University of Massachusetts, and he has had executive education in business and finance from NYU, Harvard, and USC.
Matthew Sag
Matthew Sag is a Professor of Law, Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning and Data Science at Emory University Law School. Professor Sag is an expert in copyright law and intellectual property. He is a leading U.S. authority on the fair use doctrine in copyright law and its implications for researchers in the fields of text data mining, machine learning and AI.
Professor Sag is currently working on several theoretical contributions to copyright law in relation to AI and machine learning and a series of empirical papers using text-mining and machine learning tools to study judicial behavior. His work has been published in leading journals such as Nature and Science, and the law reviews of the University of California Berkeley, Georgetown, Northwestern, Notre Dame, Vanderbilt, Iowa and William & Mary, among others. His research has been widely cited in academic works, court submissions, judicial opinions and government reports.
Howie Singer
Howie Singer PhD is an expert on music industry technologies who played a leading role in the transition to digital music delivery. At Warner Music Group, he served as SVP and Chief Strategic Technologist analyzing new business models and services. Since 2018, he has taught a graduate class on Data Analysis in the Music Industry at NYU. He is the co-author with Bill Rosenblatt of Key Changes: The Ten Times Technology Transformed the Music Industry (Oxford University Press). Howie spent the first part of his career at Bell Labs and AT&T, where he co-founded a2b music, an early digital music startup.
Bhamati Viswanathan
Bhamati Viswanathan is a Faculty Fellow at New England Law | Boston, where she teaches Copyright, Trademark, Current Issues in Intellectual Property Law, Law and the Visual Arts, and Constitutional Law. Bhamati is the author of Cultivating Copyright: How Creative Industries Can Harness Intellectual Property to Survive the Digital Age (Routledge: 2019). She is currently writing a book examining the nexus of intellectual property law, arts and culture, and philosophy in the age of artificial intelligence.
Bhamati serves as Co-Chair of the American Bar Association’s Intellectual Property Section: Emerging Technologies Committee. She is a Faculty Advisor of the Copyright Alliance Academic Advisory Board. She is Education Advisor to the Volunteer Lawyers for the Arts (VLA)/ Massachusetts Arts and Business Council. Bhamati holds an S.J.D. and LL.M. from the University of Pennsylvania Law School, and a J.D. degree from the University of Michigan Law School. She received her B.A. degree, cum laude, from Williams College.
Heather Whitney
Heather Whitney is a Technology Transactions attorney in the San Francisco office of Morrison Foerster and a member of the firm’s Artificial Intelligence Steering Committee. Heather provides product counseling and handles a range of intellectual property, technology, and entertainment transactional matters, with a focus on novel AI, copyright, and intermediary liability issues. She represents several leading companies in the generative AI space as well as Kristina Kashtanova, in Kashtanova’s efforts to register works created using generative AI tools.
Prior to joining Morrison Foerster, Heather was in academia. After clerking for Judge Diane P. Wood of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit, Heather was a Bigelow Fellow and Lecturer in Law at the University of Chicago Law School, Visiting Researcher at Harvard Law School, and Faculty Affiliate at the Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society (where she was previously a Fellow). For several years, she was also an instructor for Harvard Law School’s CopyrightX course.
Heather earned her J.D. magna cum laude from Harvard Law School. While there, she was the head of submissions for the Journal of Law and Technology. She received her B.A. in philosophy summa cum laude at the University of California, Los Angeles.
Copyright and Technology 