Pamela Samuelson
School of Law and School of Information Management and Systems (SIMS),
U. C. Berkeley
Copyright has, and will likely continue to have, an important role in the information economy and in what is often termed "the information society". Copyright's role in the future economy and in the larger society is far from clear just now. Debates on this issue can be heard in academe, in Silicon Valley, and in Congress. This talk will contrast two views of copyright for the information society: one that regards it as strictly limited to promoting commodity interests and another which regards it as a construct that should be configured to promote a broader set of social interests.
Pamela Samuelson is a Professor at the University of California at Berkeley with a joint appointment in the School of Information Management & Systems and in the School of Law. Her principal area of expertise is intellectual property law. She has written and spoken extensively about the challenges that new information technologies pose for the traditional legal regimes. She is a Contributing Editor of the Communications of the ACM, for which she writes a regular "Legally Speaking" column. In June of 1997 she was named a Fellow of the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation. She is also a Fellow of the Electronic Frontier Foundation.