>> 2002 Town Meetings >> Atlanta Atlanta: Speaker Biographies Abolins | Auslander | Beck | Christensen | Gherman | Goldman | Herrington | Jaszi | Kolker | Murray | Newcomb | Nichols | Patterson | Reeder | White Ruta Abolins Ruta Abolins is Director of the Walter J. Brown Media Archive & Peabody Awards Collection at the University of Georgia Libraries. The Archive holds over 90,000 titles and 5 million feet of newsfilm, making this one of the largest broadcasting archives in the country. The collection comprises moving image and sound collections that focus on American television and radio broadcasting; and the music, folklore, and history of Georgia. There are over 50,500 television programs and 5 million feet of newsfilm and over 39,500 radio programs in the Archives, in addition to audio folk music field tapes and home movies from rural Georgia. Licensing rights are held for many of the collections. Ruta has been a moving image archivist for the past 12 years. She has a BFA in Filmmaking from the University of Wisonsin-Milwaukee, an MA in Popular Culture from Bowling Green State University, and an MA in Library and Information Studies from the University of Wisconsin. Before coming to Georgia she spent 8 years at the Wisconsin Center for Film & Theater Research. She is currently a Member of the Board of the Association of Moving Image Archivists. Philip Auslander Philip Auslander is Professor in the School of Literature, Communication, and Culture of the Georgia Institute of Technology where he teaches Performance Studies, Cultural Studies, and Media Studies. He is a contributing editor to both the US-based TDR: The Journal of Performance Studies and the UK-based Performance Research. He received the 2000 Callaway Prize for the Best Book in Theatre or Drama for his most recent book, Liveness: Performance in a Mediatized Culture (Routledge 1999). Performance: Critical Concepts, a collection of 89 essays in four volumes, which he has just edited, will be published in 2003. In addition to his scholarly work on performance, Prof. Auslander writes art criticism for ArtForum in New York City and Art Papers in Atlanta. Auslander became interested in intellectual property issues in the late 1980s in relation to postmodernist performances that employed strategies of textual and stylistic appropriation. Since then, he has written and lectured on the implications of excluding live performances from copyright protection, the various legal strategies used to make aspects of performance "ownable" (e.g., unfair competition and right of publicity), and ongoing efforts to turn more and more aspects of performance into IP (e.g., attempts by stage directors to make direction copyrightable). Joseph Beck Joseph Beck is a partner in the Atlanta office of Kilpatrick Stockton. A graduate of Emory College and Harvard Law School, he is a former trustee of the Copyright Society of the USA, the founder of the Society's Southeast Chapter and is (and for a number of years has been) listed in Best Lawyers in America for both Copyright Law and Entertainment Law. He is an Adjunct Professor of both Copyright Law and of the First Amendment at Emory University, and has lectured on these subjects throughout the United States and in Russia. Before moving to Atlanta, he produced a television program on the law for a Washington, D.C. television station and developed a mathematical model of the criminal justice system for the Urban Institute. Intellectual property cases in which Mr. Beck has served as lead counsel include SunTrust Bank v. Houghton Mifflin (the "Gone With the Wind v. The Wind Done Gone" case) (representing the defendant); Rosa Parks v. LaFace Records, et. al., (representing the defendants); Greenberg v. National Geographic; Fantasy, Inc. v. LaFace Records, (for the defendants); and D.C. Comics, Inc. v. Unlimited Monkey Business, Inc., (for the plaintiff). Kathy Christensen Kathy Christensen is vice president of news archives and research at CNN, where she oversees CNN’s video archives and editorial research operations. Christensen is also responsible for CNN Imagesource, the stock footage licensing arm of the archive, the development of e-commerce for the video licensing business and is the project lead for CNN’s digital archive project. Christensen is based in Atlanta and reports to Scott Teissler, news and corporate chief information officer and chief technology officer for the CNN Newsgroup and Turner Broadcasting, Inc. Christensen joined CNN as a librarian six months after the network launched in June of 1980. In this position she helped develop and create the CNN library and established the stock footage licensing division of the video library. Promoted to library director in 1985, Christensen was tasked with continuing the organization of CNN’s growing library and archives and since that time, she has been instrumental in the development of Mediasource, CNN’s system for the digitization of incoming video feeds, and has established a team of researchers to support the business and corporate research needs of TBS, Inc. Christensen graduated from California State University at Fresno with a bachelor’s degree in English. In 1980 she received her masters in Library Science from Emory University. Paul M. Gherman Since 1996, Paul M. Gherman has been University Librarian and Director of the Central Library at the Jean and Alexander Heard Library at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee. The Library is home to the Vanderbilt Television News Archive. Prior to coming to Vanderbilt, he was Director of Libraries at Kenyon College in Gambier, OH and was previously University Librarian at Virginia Polytechnic and State University in Blacksburg. He has held positions at Iowa State University, the Pennsylvania State University, and Wayne State University. Mr. Gherman received his M.A.L.S. from the University of Michigan in 1971. He received the Distinguished Alumnus Award from the School of Information at the University of Michigan in 1997. He is past President of the Association of Southeastern Research Libraries (ASERL), he has been a member of the Board of Directors of SOLINET and of OCLC, and currently serves on the OCLC Members Council. Gherman is keenly interested in electronic publishing and scholarly communication and has been actively involved in this area for the last ten years through writing, speaking and project development. He was also active in the creation of the Blacksburg Electronic Village, a nearly community-based telecommunications experiment in what we now know as the Internet. Jerry Goldman Jerry Goldman is Professor of Political Science at Northwestern University. For the last ten years, Goldman has been developing accessible digital resources on the United States Supreme Court. The OYEZ Project (funded by NEH and NSF) is a web-based multimedia relational database on the Court, its justices and their decisions. The database contains upwards of 2400 case abstracts, 2000+ hours of oral arguments, and a QTVR tour of the Supreme Court building. With additional support from NSF (in collaboration with Professor Mark Kornbluh and his "National Gallery of the Spoken Word" Project), Goldman is investigating text-track searching capabilities with audio playback. The aim is to transform the OYEZ audio archive into a powerful resource for scholarly and instructional purposes. The OYEZ Project has won numerous awards including the 1998 Silver Gavel Award for New Media, the highest distinction conferred by the American Bar Association for works that improve public understanding of law. Goldman received the 1997 EDUCOM Medal for his contributions to computing and higher education. TyAnna K. Herrington TyAnna Herrington is an Associate Professor in the School of Literature, Communication, and Culture at Georgia Tech. Her background in law contributes to her interest in intellectual property issues, although her specialization in rhetoric and technical communication drives her ideological inquiry. Herrington's book, Controlling Voices: Intellectual Property, Humanistic Studies, and the Internet (SIU Press, 2001) examines the digital influence on ideological conflict in intellectual property law. Although many of her publications treat issues in intellectual property, the first amendment, and the work for hire doctrine, she has also published articles treating document design. Supported by a Fulbright grant to St. Petersburg, Russia, Herrington developed and continues to expand a distance learning project in technical communication that electronically links students and faculty in St. Petersburg, Russia with those at Georgia Tech. Herrington teaches technical communication and intellectual property courses both virtually and in the networked computer-based classroom. Peter Jaszi Peter Jaszi teaches at the Washington College of Law of The American University, in Washington, D.C., where he directs the new Glushko-Samuelson Intellectual Property Clinic and the Program on Intellectual Property and the Public Interest. Professor Jaszi is a graduate of Harvard College and Harvard Law School, and an experienced copyright litigator who lectures frequently to professional groups in the United States and abroad. He has served as a Trustee of the Copyright Society of the U.S.A., and currently sits on the editorial board of its journal. In 1994 he was a member of the Librarian of Congress Advisory Commission on Copyright Registration and Deposit. The following year he helped to organize the Digital Future Coalition. With Craig Joyce, William Patry, and Marshall Leaffer, he is co-author of a standard text on copyright. With Martha Woodmansee, he edited, The Construction of Authorship, a collection of essays on copyright and literary theory published by Duke University Press. Robert Kolker Robert Kolker, currently Chair of The School of Literature, Communication, and Culture at Georgia Tech, is the author of five books on cinema studies. The 3rd edition of A Cinema of Loneliness: Penn, Stone, Kubrick, Scorsese, Spielberg, Altman appeared in 2000 and was recently translated into German. His textbook, Film, Form, and Culture contains the first introduction to film through both a textbook and an interactive CD-ROM. It was this CD-ROM that pointed to ways that copyright issues for the educational use of moving images could be solved. The CD is the end product of an experiment begun when Kolker created one of the first film essays that made use of moving images. "The Moving Image Reclaimed," published in the online subscription journal, Postmodern Culture in 1994. He recently edited a film edition of Postmodern Culture that concentrated on a variety of essays that made use of digital technologies in the study of cinema: <http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/postmodern_culture/v008/>. He co-authored with Janet Murray an NEH grant for the creation of digital edition of Casablanca. He is currently writing a book on 20th Century concepts of space in film, painting, photography, and graphic arts. Janet Murray Professor Janet H. Murray is an internationally recognized interactive designer and the director of Georgia Tech's graduate program in Information Design and Technology. Her recent book, Hamlet on the Holodeck: The Future of Narrative in Cyberspace (Free Press, 1997; MIT Press 1998) is widely used as a roadmap to the coming broadband art and entertainment environments. In spring 2000 she was named a Trustee of the American Film Institute, where she also participates as a mentor in the Intel-sponsored Enhanced TV Workshop. She is currently working on a textbook for MIT Press, Inventing the Medium: A Principled Approach to Interactive Design. She holds a Ph.D. in English from Harvard University, and before coming to Georgia Tech in 1999 taught humanities and led advanced interactive design projects at MIT. Horace Newcomb Horace Newcomb, Lambdin Kay Distinguished Professor for the Peabody Awards at the Grady College of Journalism and Mass Communication, University of Georgia, Newcomb is widely regarded as one of the founders of academic media criticism and television studies in the United States. He has more than 30 years of experience in higher education, having taught at colleges and universities in Iowa, Michigan, Maryland, and at the University of Texas at Austin. He is editor of The Museum of Broadcast Communications Encyclopedia of Television, a three-volume reference work containing more than 1,000 entries on major people, programs and topics related to television in the United States, the United Kingdom, Canada and Australia. The Encyclopedia was created during his tenure as curator for the Museum of Broadcast Communications in Chicago from 1994 to 1996. A native of Jackson, Miss., he earned a Ph.D. and M.A. at the University of Chicago and a B.A. at Mississippi College. He is the author of TV: The Most Popular Art, co-author (with Robert S. Alley), of The Producer's Medium, and editor of six editions of Television: The Critical View. Madeleine Nichols Madeleine Nichols has been Curator of the Dance Collection, The New York Public Library for the Performing Arts at Lincoln Center since 1988. She formerly served there as head of the Jerome Robbins Archive of the Recorded Moving Image. She is also an attorney, specializing in contracts, estates and copyright, and an Adjunct Professor at New York University’s School of Education. Active in professional associations in the fields of law, libraries, and dance, she is presently on the Board of Directors and Editorial Board of the Society of Dance History Scholars; is a member of the National Leadership Group of the UCLA Dance/Media Project and is on the National Council of the Atlantic Center for the Arts. She is a member of professional associations including: American Library Association; Association of College and Research Libraries; Library Information and Technology Association, Arts and Technology Committee; American Society of Aesthetics; Congress on Research on Dance; Dance Critics Association; and the World of Dance Alliance Libraries Committee, Documentation Committee and Database Committee. With colleagues in major research libraries, she is a founding member of the Dance Heritage Coalition and the American Library Association’s Dance Librarian’s Committee. Her continuing interests are the international protection of artists’ rights and economic concerns; and the implications of media and technology in arts and education. L. Ray Patterson L. Ray Patterson, Pope Brock Professor of Law at the University of Georgia School of Law, has been a member of the UGA law faculty since 1986. His areas of expertise are copyright law and lawyer's law. He is the author of the classic Copyright in Historical Perspective, The Nature of Copyright: A Law of Users' Rights (with the late Stanley Lindberg, 1991) and "Copyright for the New Millennium" in the Ohio State Law Journal (2001). Patterson was appointed special assistant attorney general of Georgia for copyright matters and wrote the attorney general's opinion on fair use of copyrighted materials for teaching and research. In 1996, he wrote an amicus brief, filed on behalf of ten other national copyright professors, which the Sixth Circuit considered in rendering the first U.S. appellate ruling on the fair use of copyrighted materials for classroom use (Princeton University Press v. Michigan Document Services, Inc., 99 F.3d 1381 (6th Cir., 1996). In 1973, he was named dean and professor of law at Emory University; he stepped down from the deanship in 1980 but remained at Emory until joining the University of Georgia as a chaired professor in 1986. Patterson has also served as a visiting professor at Duke University and the University of Texas. He is the first recipient of the American Library Association’s L. Ray Patterson Copyright Award. Russell P. Reeder Russell P. Reeder, president and CEO, founded RightsLine after identifying a process to converge the sophisticated technology of Silicon Valley with the valuable content of Hollywood. Prior to founding RightsLine, Reeder spent 12 years in information technology, both in sales and software development. Reeder led the sales teams for several ERP and point solution vendors, including executive positions at Oracle Corporation. Reeder spent several years leading the development of financial and manufacturing applications for Fortune 50 companies including Mobil Oil Corporation, Bank of America and CoreStates Bank. After creating the e-commerce strategy for companies varying from the U.S. Postal Service, Federal Reserve and Applied Materials, Reeder moved into an executive position with RightWorks, a Sequoia Capital-backed startup, where he established B2B Web strategies for some of the most cutting-edge dot com startups including Embion.com, Fasturn.com and Silicon Valley Bank's eSource.com. Reeder holds a bachelor's degree of science in computer information systems from James Madison University. Reeder is a member of the Board of Directors for RightsLine. Matthew White Matthew White serves as Vice President of the National Geographic Television and Film (NGT&F) Library. As head of the Film Library since May 2000, White runs the day-to-day operations of the video and film archiving and licensing division, focusing on all visual assets including clip services and distribution for onboard exhibition. With stock footage encompassing more than 12 million feet of film dating from the mid-1960s to the present, White recently directed the digitizing of more than 2,000 hours of programming, to be made available to in-house news producers and external clients. In this capacity, White continues to serve the interests of third-party producers, agencies, and outside companies engaged in the licensing of NGT&F footage, and he actively seeks to establish new relationships, both domestically and internationally, to extend the reach of the Film Library throughout the world. White came to National Geographic from Chicago’s WPA Film Library, a subsidiary of MPI Media Group, where he served as both Founder and President for 13 years. Prior to WPA, White founded DOCUPOP in 1985, where he produced several short, award-winning programs for home video release. As Editorial Director for Entertainment and Computers at Publications International Ltd. from 1979 to 1985, White managed the editorial staff on a variety of publications.