Mission
Union for the Public Domain (UPD) is a non-profit citizens group. Our mission is to protect and enhance the public domain in matters concerning intellectual property. We are a membership organization, acting as an independent voice on intellectual property issues.
History
UPD was started in 1996. You can see our old pages here.
Contact
To contact UPD, e-mail our coordinator at updinfo@public-domain.org.
Shyamkrishna Balganesh
Michael Davis - Michael C. Davis is a Professor of Law. He has served as the Schell Senior Fellow at the Orville Schell, Jr. Center for International Human Rights at the Yale Law School (1994-95), the Frederick K. Cox Visiting Professor of Human Rights Law at Case Western Reserve University Law School (Fall, 2000) and as a Visiting Scholar at the Harvard Law School (2000-2001).
Peter Eckersley - Peter Eckersley is a digital technology researcher and PhD student, with the Intellectual Property Research Institute of Australia, and the Department of Computer Science, at the University of Melbourne. His research interests include the use of alternative compensation systems to remunerate authors and artists while allowing unlimited distribution of their work; and interactions between public, open science and the commercialisation of R & D.
Robin Gross - Robin D. Gross is an attorney and Executive Directive of IP Justice a grassroots civil liberties organization that promotes balanced intellectual property law and protects freedom of expression. Ms. Gross regularly speaks at international conferences and publishes on cyberspace legal issues such as digital copyright, circumvention, and fair use, and she has testified before the U.S. Copyright Office on the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA). The editors of the legal newspaper Daily Journal selected Ms. Gross as one of California’s “Top Ten Most Influential Attorneys in 2001.”
Gwen Hinze - Gwen Hinze is a Staff Attorney with the Electronic Frontier Foundation, specializing in intellectual property and Internet regulation policy issues. She has worked on various EFF cases involving the impact of copyright law on technology and freedom of expression online. Before joining EFF, Gwen worked at the Federal Court of Australia, and with the Australian government in public policy and litigation. Prior to that, she practiced in M&A, capital markets, and infrastructure law at the international Australian law firm, Allens Arthur Robinson. Gwen holds a Bachelor of Laws with Honors and a Bachelor of Arts with Honors from Australia's Monash University.
Tim Hubbard - Dr. Tim Hubbard is the head of Human Genome Analysis at the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute. He is joint head of the Ensembl genome annotation project, which is the leading database and access point for the human genome sequence. He is also co-author of SCOP, one of the first biological databases to provide access via the web in 1994. Following the controversy surrounding the ownership and access to the human genome sequence, he has become a leading advocate of the benefits of strong 'openness' for science and society as a whole.
James Love - James has worked for the Center for Study of Responsive Law since 1990, and since 1995 is the Director of the Consumer Project on Technology. Mr. Love is an advisor on intellectual property policies to a number of national governments, international and regional intergovernmental organizations, public health NGOs, and private sector pharmaceutical companies. Mr. Love is the US co-chair of the Trans Atlantic Consumer Dialogue (TACD) Working Group on Intellectual Property, a member of the MSF Working Group on Intellectual Property and the MSF Neglected Disease Group, President of Essential Inventions, Inc. and a former member of the World Business Council on Sustainable Development, Working Group on Access to Human Genetic Resources. Mr. Love was previously Senior Economist for the Frank Russell Company, a Lecturer at Rutgers University, and a researcher on international finance at Princeton University. Mr. Love received a Masters of Public Administration from Harvard University's Kennedy School of Government, and a Masters in Public Affairs from the Princeton's Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs.
Richard Stallman - Richard Stallman is the founder of the Gnu Project, launched in 1984 to develop the free operating system GNU (an acronym for ``GNU's Not Unix''), and thereby give computer users the freedom that most of them have lost. GNU is free software: everyone is free to copy it and redistribute it, as well as to make changes either large or small. Today, Linux-based variants of the GNU system, based on the kernel Linux developed by Linus Torvalds, are in widespread use. Stallman graduated from Harvard in 1974 with a BA in physics. Stallman received the Grace Hopper award for 1991 from the Association for Computing Machinery, for his development of the first Emacs editor. In 1990 he was awarded a Macarthur foundation fellowship, and in 1996 an honorary doctorate from the royal institute of Technology in Sweden.
Robert Weissman - Robert Weissman is editor of Multinational Monitor magazine and co-author of the weekly column "Focus on the Corporation." A lawyer, he is also co-director of Essential Action, a Ralph Nader-founded corporate accountability organization. Robert has worked on a wide range of corporate accountability issues, including: trade agreements including NAFTA and GATT, corporate welfare, intellectual property rules, tobacco, corporate misconduct in the Third World, workplace safety and corporate speech rights. He is the author of Corporate Predators.
