Supporters

• Norman Lear

  

  Norman Lear has enjoyed a long career in television and film, and as a political and social activist and philanthropist. Known as the creator of Archie Bunker and "All in the Family," Lear's television credits include "Sanford & Son"; "Maude"; "Good Times"; "The Jeffersons"; "Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman"; "Fernwood 2Nite" and the dramatic series "Palmerstown U.S.A." His motion picture credits include "Cold Turkey," "Divorce American Style," "Fried Green Tomatoes," "Stand By Me" and "The Princess Bride." In 1982, he produced the two-hour special "I Love Liberty" for ABC. In 1999, President Clinton bestowed the National Medal of Arts on Mr. Lear, noting that "Norman Lear has held up a mirror to American society and changed the way we look at it." He has the distinction of being among the first seven television pioneers inducted into the Television Academy Hall of Fame (1984). He received four Emmy Awards (1970, 1971, 1972, 1973) and a Peabody Award (1977) for All in the Family, as well as awards from the International Platform Association (1977), the Writers Guild of America (1977) and many other professional and civic organizations. Mr. Lear also has founded several nonprofit organizations including People For the American Way; the Norman Lear Center at the USC Annenberg School for Communication; the Environmental Media Association; and the Business Enterprise Trust. In 2000, Norman and Lyn Lear bought one of the few surviving original prints of the Declaration of Independence. The document has traveled the country as the centerpiece of the Declaration of Independence Road Trip, a touring theatrical event and civic education program. Mr. Lear also created Declare Yourself, a national nonpartisan, nonprofit program to energize and empower a new movement of young voters. Mr. Lear is married to Lyn Davis Lear and resides in Los Angeles, California. He has six children: Ellen, Kate, Maggie, Benjamin, Brianna and Madeline.

• Lawrence Lessig

  

  Lawrence Lessig is a Professor of Law at Stanford Law School and founder of the school's Center for Internet and Society. Prior to joining the Stanford faculty, he was the Berkman Professor of Law at Harvard Law School, and a Professor at the University of Chicago. He clerked for Judge Richard Posner on the 7th Circuit Court of Appeals and Justice Antonin Scalia on the United States Supreme Court.

  For much of his career, Professor Lessig focused on law and technology, especially as it affects copyright. He represented web site operator Eric Eldred in the ground-breaking case Eldred v. Ashcroft, a challenge to the 1998 Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act. His current academic work addresses a kind of "corruption."

  He has won numerous awards, including the Free Software Foundation's Freedom Award, and was named one of Scientific American's Top 50 Visionaries, for arguing "against interpretations of copyright that could stifle innovation and discourse online."

  Professor Lessig is the author of Code v2 (2007), Free Culture (2004), The Future of Ideas (2001) and Code and Other Laws of Cyberspace (1999). He is CEO of the Creative Commons project, and is on the board of MAPLight and the Sunlight Foundation. He has served on the board of the Free Software Foundation, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, the Public Library of Science, and Public Knowledge. He was also a columnist for Wired, Red Herring, and the Industry Standard.

  Professor Lessig earned a BA in economics and a BS in management from the University of Pennsylvania, an MA in philosophy from Cambridge, and a JD from Yale.

  Professor Lessig teaches and writes in the areas of constitutional law, contracts, and the law of cyberspace.

  For more information, see his curriculum vitae.

• Fred Graver

  

  Fred Graver (on left) is a three-time Emmy Winner and two-time Webby Winner. He has written for the National Lampoon, Late Night with David Letterman, In Living Color and Cheers, and was executive producer of "The Concert For New York City" in 2001.

  He worked with the Disney Imagineers on the Telefusion project, created "Zoog Disney," and operated Vh1.com, Sonicnet.com, Country.Com, and Acceptable.tv. He is the creator of VH1's "Best Week Ever," as well as Bestweekever.tv.

  And yet... and yet... people seem most impressed by the fact that he wrote a "Choose Your Own Adventure" book, "Journey To Stonehenge."

  He lives in New York City with his wife, Betsy and their son, Harry.

• Erika Johansson

  

  As a self professed history junkie, Erika Johansson loves to read dusty old history books with long subtitles. To the chagrin of her more outgoing friends, an exciting weekend is spent digging through the film archives at the Museum of Radio and Television or attending a lecture on an obscure Dutch naturalist painter. It takes effort to be so nerdy, however, and occasionally she has to take a break to do yoga, cook her world renown macaroni and cheese, and watch Mad Men.

  Erika is a recent graduate of NYU’s Gallatin School of Individualized Study. She has interned at both The Daily Show with Jon Stewart and the Colbert Report. She currently resides in the hills overlooking Los Angeles.

• Noel Hidalgo

  "Noneck" Noel Hidalgo is a internationally recognized global pioneer. After surviving the economic bubble burst, he went to work for John Kerry's Presidential Campaign, 2004 Democratic Convention, the New York State Democratic Party, and the New York State Senate Minority Leaders office. His work has helped candidates and elected officials move into the Politics 2.0 world. He is also known for helping organizing portions of New York City's Open-Source community and building New York City's first Coworking office at The Change You Want To See gallery in Brooklyn. As a global explorer and community organizer, Noel's unique understanding of needs and 21st century tools has taken him around the world to build bridges connecting the heart and soul of the Internet.

  Noel is a graduate of the school of hard knocks and also helps run Not an Alternative http://notanalternative.net, a non-profit production company in Williamsburg, Brooklyn.

• Norman Lear Center

  

  Based at the USC Annenberg School for Communication, the Norman Lear Center is a multidisciplinary research and public policy center exploring implications of the convergence of entertainment, commerce, and society. On the University of Southern California campus, the Lear Center builds bridges between eleven schools whose faculty study aspects of entertainment, media, and culture. Beyond campus, it bridges the gap between the entertainment industry and academia, and between them and the public. Through scholarship and research; through its programs of visiting fellows, conferences, public events, and publications; and in its attempts to illuminate and repair the world, the Lear Center works to be at the forefront of discussion and practice in the field.

• Creative Commons

  

  Creative Commons is a Massachusetts-chartered 501(c)(3) tax-exempt charitable corporation. Too often the debate over creative control tends to the extremes. At one pole is a vision of total control — a world in which every last use of a work is regulated and in which "all rights reserved" (and then some) is the norm. At the other end is a vision of anarchy — a world in which creators enjoy a wide range of freedom but are left vulnerable to exploitation. Balance, compromise, and moderation — once the driving forces of a copyright system that valued innovation and protection equally — have become endangered species. Creative Commons is working to revive them. We use private rights to create public goods: creative works set free for certain uses. Like the free software and open-source movements, our ends are cooperative and community-minded, but our means are voluntary and libertarian. We work to offer creators a best-of-both-worlds way to protect their works while encouraging certain uses of them — to declare "some rights reserved."

• Eastmedia

  

  Eastmedia is proud to be a part of Remix America. We designed and built the Remixamerica.org beta site and look forward to launching some exciting community features this Spring.

  Eastmedia is a full service software product development company, specializing in Web application design and development, mobile and wireless development, and strategic and technology consulting. Possessing a common passion and vision for the rapidly evolving role of technology in everyday lives, Eastmedia was created with a mission to focus on the synergy between form and function required for great products.

  In early 2005 Eastmedia began using the Ruby on Rails framework as its primary technology choice for Web Development. Since then we have become a leader in the New York City Ruby community, and our team is comprised of active participants, Open Source project contributors, instructors, book authors and speakers in the global Ruby communities.

  Our primary areas of expertise include User Experience, Web Design, Ruby on Rails Web Development, Mobile Application Development and OpenID.

• Kaltura.com

  

  Kaltura is the leader in open-source video creation, discovery, and collaboration, building the world's largest video network across thousands of sites. Launched in September of 2007, and winner of both Techcrunch40 and Mashable's Open Web People's Choice Awards, Kaltura's pioneering open-source platform enables web publishers to engage with their users by easily adding interactive video and rich-media functionality - including searching, uploading, importing, editing, remixing, and sharing. Moreover, the platform that has been dubbed 'Wiki meets YouTube' includes unique collaboration functionalities that allow groups of users to create and consume rich media together. This collaboration increases users' engagement by adding a social element to the rich media experience. The collaboration also transcends the boundaries of individual websites by aggregating content across the Kaltura Global Network, providing publishers of all sizes new syndication opportunities and enabling access to 3rd-party web services (such as DVD burning, or professional video editing).

  Kaltura's platform has been embraced by Wikipedia, the leader in online collaboration. Kaltura and the Wikimedia Foundation have launched a beta program aimed at reaching Wikipedia's 200M viewers. Integrating Kaltura's platform into the MediaWiki architecture is only the first step in our strategy that rests on creating similar open-source collaborative video extensions to all other major CMS (Content Management System). Kaltura's goal is to create the world's first and largest network of legally sharable and remixable rich media content.

• Fair Use Project (Center for Internet and Society)

  

  The Stanford Center for Internet and Society's "Fair Use Project" ("the FUP") was founded in 2006 to provide legal support to a range of projects designed to clarify, and extend, the boundaries of "fair use" in order to enhance creative freedom.

  The FUP provides an expanding array of assistance to content creators. It has advised prominent creators and distributors of documentary films concerning fair use, defamation, trademark infringement, and other issues relating to the appropriate bounds of free expression. While is impossible to eliminate completely the risk of a dispute, this analysis helps reduce and identify liability and litigation risks before the fact, so that informed decisions can be made.

• Declare Yourself

  

  Declare Yourself is a national nonpartisan, nonprofit campaign to empower and encourage every eligible young voter in America to register and vote in the presidential primaries and 2008 presidential election.

  Using the power of strategic media partnerships, celebrity spokespeople, the sports arena, and most importantly, mobile and Internet technology, Declare Yourself's campaign blankets the landscape of popular culture, as well as universities and high schools, with a simple, clear message: register, get informed, and VOTE!

• Harvey Kaye

  

  Harvey J. Kaye is the Ben and Joyce Rosenberg Professor of Social Change and Development and Director of the Center for History and Social Change at the University of Wisconsin-Green Bay. An award-winning author and editor of fifteen books – including Thomas Paine and the Promise of America (2005), Are We Good Citizens? (2001), and The American Radical (1994) – he is currently working on FDR, The Four Freedoms, and the Greatest Generation.

• Electronic Frontier Foundation

  

  When our freedoms in the networked world come under attack, the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) is the first line of defense. EFF broke new ground when it was founded in 1990 — well before the Internet was on most people's radar — and continues to confront cutting-edge issues defending free speech, privacy, innovation, and consumer rights today. From the beginning, EFF has championed the public interest in every critical battle affecting digital rights. Blending the expertise of lawyers, policy analysts, activists, and technologists, EFF achieves significant victories on behalf of consumers and the general public. EFF fights for freedom primarily in the courts, bringing and defending lawsuits even when that means taking on the US government or large corporations. EFF is a donor-funded nonprofit and depends on your support to continue successfully defending your digital rights. Litigation is particularly expensive; because two-thirds of our budget comes from individual donors, every contribution is critical to helping EFF fight —and win—more cases.

• Program on Information Justice and Intellectual Property

  

  Through research, scholarship, public events, advocacy, and provision of legal and consulting services, the Program on Information Justice and Intellectual Property (PIJIP) promotes approaches to domestic and international IP and information laws that further the achievement of human rights and social justice.

• American University Center for Social Media

  

  The Center for Social Media showcases and analyzes strategies to use media as creative tools for public knowledge and action. It focuses on social documentaries for civil society and democracy, and on the public media environment that supports them. The Center is part of the School of Communication at American University.