Darklight Perspectives Conference 17th November 2001 Speakers Biography's

Lawrence Lessig : Ian Clarke : Joshua Davis: John Perry Barlow: Paul Largan

Lawrence Lessig: is a Professor of Law at the Stanford Law School. He graduated from Yale Law School in 1989, and then clerked for Judge Richard Posner of the 7th Circuit Court of Appeals, and Justice Antonin Scalia on the Supreme Court. From 1991 to 1997, he was a professor at the University of Chicago Law School. He then became the Berkman Professor of Law at Harvard Law School. In 1999-2000, he was a fellow at the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin before moving to Stanford in 2000.

Lessig teaches and writes in the areas of constitutional law, contracts, comparative constitutional law, and the law of cyberspace. His book, Code, and Other Laws of Cyberspace, was published by Basic Books, and his newest book, The Future of Ideas: The Fate of the Commons in a Connected World, will be published by Random House in November, 2001.

Professor Lawrence Lessig teaches and writes in the areas of constitutional law, contracts, comparative constitutional law, and the law of cyberspace. His book, Code, and Other Laws of Cyberspace, is published by Basic Books. In 1999-2000, he was a fellow at the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin.

Lessig is perhaps the most prominent legal thinker on the intersection of the law and the Internet

Lessig's scholarship has been the subject of widespread debate, particularly following the release last year of his book Code and Other Laws of Cyberspace. The book explores how the architecture of computer networks affects basic liberties, and the implications of the use of code to either suppress or promote freedom. Mark A. Lemley, a professor at Berkeley's Boalt Hall Law School, said Code ". . . may be the most important book ever published about the Internet . . ."

Lessig sided with the Net music-swapping service Napster Inc. in its doomed court battle against the record companies, which sued for copyright violations. He backed hackers who posted code on the Web that let people duplicate movie DVDs. The judge heeded him when he supported the US government in its antitrust case against Microsoft Corp

Lessig argues that legal mistakes, such as overly strong interpretations of intellectual-property law, favor established players at the expense of innovators and upstarts. He wants to restructure intellectual-property rules so that ideas are more quickly released into an intellectual commons where others can improve upon them.

He has been involved in a similar event in Harvard, the "Signal to Noise" conference which brought the creative community together with the lawyers and policy makers in order to explore the issues related to regulation, ownership and control of online content.

http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/lessigbio.html

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Ian Clarke: Ian Clarke is the architect and coordinator of The Freenet Project, and the Chief Technology Officer of Uprizer inc, a company he founded to realise commercial applications for the Freenet technology. Ian holds a degree in Artificial Intelligence and Computer Science from Edinburgh University, Scotland. He has worked as a consultant for a number of companies including 3Com, and Logica UK's Space Division. He is originally from County Meath, Ireland.

Freenet: Clarke has been acknowledged as one of the most influential figures involved in the Internet. He has created a program called Freenet.

Freenet was developed in July 1999 while Clarke was a student of artificial intelligence and computer science at the University of Edinburgh. In a paper he wrote for a class, he came up with a design for a distributed file-sharing network, in which all users can be anonymous, or not, according to their choice. He put his idea out on the Internet, and contributors from around the world were allowed to tweak and improve on it. Freenet was finally released on the Internet in March 2000.

Like the name implies, Freenet is all about making, and keeping, information free. It's a distributed file-sharing network, where all users are completely anonymous and there's no central distribution server -- which means no master list of users, no one to sue, and no way to shut it down. The Napster court case immediately brought Clarke's Freenet into the limelight. Here was a system that Internet and more particularly copyright laws could not touch. Clarke has built the seeds of a radically new Internet

With the implications of Freenet becoming clearer to the digital world, Clarke is now an oft quoted commentator on issues of free speech, piracy, copyright and how creative content should be distributed online.

http://freenet.sourceforge.net/

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Joshua Davis: has been called "the best web designer in the world"

He is one of the first examples of an artist who has adopted the tenets of the open source movement favoured by the software movement. Opensource has revolutionised the way we view ownership of content on the Internet. It allows for the sharing rather than the monopolisation of ideas. Davis' Flash animation design techniques are online and accessible allowing other artists to learn from his efforts and ultimately progress their own ideas.

He runs - http://www.praystation.com/ a one-man research and development web-site. Its objective is "to apply design and technology into a collection of small, sometimes daily, modules - is incubating a lifestyle, a mentality, living with anomalies (1 : deviation from the common rule : IRREGULARITY; 2 : something different, abnormal, peculiar, or not easily classified), producing work in a world that is under constant flux and change."

He is also the sole creator of http://www.once-upon-a-forest.com/ - which is the nemesis of what we perceive the web to be. No easy, short domain name. No easy to use navigation. No instructions. No Faq's. No Ads, No Links, No Tech Support. No Help. No Answers.

A good amount of time is spent trying to - Unite : Communicate : Explore - on http://www.dreamless.org/ -" where we cannot continue to grow in the field of design and technology acting independent - We must combine forces, and relinquish our interpretations about what does and doesn't work. Understand that knowing where to buy bricks does not mean you know how to build a house."

When not working on his five websites, Davis works as senior design technologist at Kioken--the Manhattan web design company that made waves on CNN last spring for "firing" Sony as a client.

John Perry Barlow
Born, Jackson Hole, Wyoming October 3, 1947
John Perry Barlow is a former Wyoming rancher and Grateful Dead lyricist. He graduated in 1969 with High Honors in comparative religion from Wesleyan University in Middletown, Connecticut.

More recently, he co-founded and still co-chairs the Electronic Frontier Foundation. He was the first to apply the term Cyberspace to the "place" it presently describes.

He has written for a diversity of publications, including Communications of the ACM, Mondo 2000, The New York Times, and Time. He has been on the masthead of Wired Magazine since it was founded. His piece on the future of copyright, "The Economy of Ideas" is taught in many law schools and his "Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace" is posted on thousands of web sites.

In 1997, he was a Fellow at Harvard's Institute of Politics and has been, since 1998, as a Berkman Fellow at the Harvard Law School.

He works actively with several consulting groups, including Diamond Technology Partners, Vanguard, and Global Business Network.

In June 1999, FutureBanker Magazine named him "One of the 25 Most Influential People in Financial Services He writes, speaks, and consults on a broad variety of subjects, particularly digital economy.

He lives in Wyoming, New York, San Francisco, On the Road, and in Cyberspace. He has three teenaged daughters and aspires to be a good ancestor.

Paul Largan
Film and multi-media production company working in UK, Republic of Ireland and USA. The company develops film projects with acclaimed directors Patrick Jolley and Hugh McGrory. In receipt of funding from Irish Film Board and NIFC (Northern Ireland Film Commission). Past experience from Paul Largan includes Producing/Executive Producing 26 short films with an average budget of £25,000 for NIFC, British Screen, BBC.

The company has received funding for the BanDigital screening series from amongst others: BBC NI, Department of Culture, Arts & Leisure NI, LEDU, Northern Irish Tourist Board, Training for Women Network, Belfast City Council. This evolved as the online-promtotional-arm for the 'Made in Northern Ireland' screening series 1999-2000 in USA, hosted by Irish actors Liam Neeson, Orla Brady and Colin Farrell. This new innovative and forward thinking project has been created to promote, network and distribute Ireland's filmmakers and creative industries on a world stage. The website is currently broadcasting the Apache-Tribe digital music video initiative which received it's US premiere on October 22nd in New York as part of Bandigital's current screening initiative in New York, Boston and Park City, Utah. Film program includes new cutting edge Irish film, documentary and Alan Clarke's Northern Irish classics, 'Elephant' and 'Contact' with the support of BBC NI...
Bandigital.com
Email: paul@bandigital.com