The QCO Team

Karl Fogel

Karl Fogel is an open source developer, author, and copyright reform activist. After working on CVS and writing "Open Source Development With CVS" (Coriolis, 1999), he went to CollabNet, Inc as a founding developer in the Subversion project. Based on his experiences there, he wrote "Producing Open Source Software: How to Run a Successful Free Software Project" (O'Reilly, 2005). After a brief stint as an Open Source Specialist at Google in 2006, he left to found QuestionCopyright.org. He now works at Canonical, Ltd and at QuestionCopyright.org, and writes and speaks regularly on copyright, open source, and the application of open source principles to areas outside software. His home page is red-bean.com/kfogel.

Karl Fogel serves as President and Secretary.

Jeff Ubois

Jeff Ubois is director of archival solutions at Intelligent Television, a producer of educational video materials funded by the Hewlett Foundation. He is also an advisor to Preserving Digital Public Television based at WNET in New York. Earlier, he was staff research associate at the School of Information Management and Systems at the University of California, Berkeley, where he developed approaches to measure the accessibility of archival holdings. For the Internet Archive, he has helped to develop policies for handling violent images, maintaining archival integrity, and managing usage data. He writes about issues in television archiving and digital video at http://www.archival.tv. His articles have appeared in First Monday, the Journal of Digital Information, Release 1.0, ComputerWorld, and the publications of Ferris Research, a San Francisco-based consultancy specializing in collaboration software.

Jeff Ubois serves as Treasurer.

Bob Ostertag

Composer, performer, historian, instrument builder, journalist, activist, kayak instructor Bob Ostertag's work cannot easily be summarized or pigeon-holed. He has published 21 CDs of music, two movies, two DVDs, and two books. His writings on contemporary politics have been published on every continent and in many languages. Electronic instruments of his own design are at the cutting edge of both music and video performance technology. He has performed at music, film, and multi-media festivals around the globe. His radically diverse collaborators include the Kronos Quartet, avant garder John Zorn, heavy metal star Mike Patton, jazz great Anthony Braxton, dyke punk rocker Lynn Breedlove, drag diva Justin Bond, Quebecois film maker Pierre Hébert, and others. He is rumored to have connections to the shadowy media guerrilla group The Yes Men. In March 2006 Ostertag made all of his recordings to which he owns the rights available as free digital downloads under a Creative Commons license, and in October 2007 he released his new album w00t online for free distribution. He is currently Professor of Technocultural Studies and Music at the University of California at Davis.

Shinjoung Yeo

ShinJoung Yeo is Coordinator for Reference and Outreach Services in the Stanford University Library, and also serves as Bibliographer for Communication in the Social Sciences Resource Group. She is also a founding member of Radical Reference, a collective of volunteer library workers who use their professional skills to answer information needs from the general public, independent journalists, and activists. She was named 2005 Library Journal Mover & Shaker with her husband James Jacobs. She holds both a bachelors (1999) and masters (2002) degree in Journalism and Communications from the University of Oregon. She previously worked as a reference librarian at the University of California at San Diego and the San Diego Community College District Libraries, and as a news reporter for Korean-American Television in Los Angeles. In September of 2007 she and James Jacobs took the Internet Archive's Bookmobile on a tour of Northern California, bringing a demonstration of print-on-demand services to communities that do not have easy access to a wide variety of printed materials.

James Jacobs

James Jacobs is International Documents Librarian at Stanford University Library. Before coming to Stanford, he was state, local and international government information librarian at UC San Diego. He received his MSLIS from the University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign in 2002, and is a member of Beta Phi Mu. He is very active in the library community, concentrating on issues that affect society at large, such as fair use, open access to scholarly research, and permanent access to government information. Jacobs is a member of the Government Documents Roundtable (GODORT) of the American Library Association. He is former chair of GODORT's Government Information Technology Committee (GITCO) and has served on the State and Local Documents Taskforce (SLDTF) and the Publications Committee. He was named 2005 Library Journal Mover & Shaker with his wife Shinjoung Yeo, for their continuing work as founders of Radical Reference. He has also been involved in the Urbana-Champaign Independent Media Center, and co-founded Free Government Information.

Brewster Kahle

Brewster Kahle is an Internet entrepreneur, activist, philanthropist and digital librarian/archivist. Kahle graduated from MIT in 1982 with a degree in computer engineering, having studied artificial intelligence with Marvin Minsky and W. Daniel Hillis. He was an early member of the Thinking Machines team, where he invented the Wide Area Information Server (WAIS) system; he later started WAIS, Inc., the nonprofit Internet Archive, and Alexa Internet. In 2005, Kahle was elected a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He is a Director of the Internet Archive, a member of the Board of Directors of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, and one of the initiators of the Open Content Alliance. He and his wife also created the Kahle/Austin Foundation, which has supported the Internet Archive, Public Knowledge, and Creative Commons, among others. Kahle's stated mission is "Universal Access to all Knowledge".

Artist in Residence

Nina Paley

Nina Paley is the author of the freely licensed hit animated film Sita Sings the Blues, a longtime veteran of syndicated comic strips — "Fluff" (Universal Press Syndicate), "The Hots" (King Features), and her own alternative weekly "Nina's Adventures" — and a committed Free Culture activist. She teaches at Parsons School of Design in Manhattan and is a 2006 Guggenheim Fellow. Since 2009 she has been Artist in Residence at QuestionCopyright.org, where she is currently working on Minute Memes and the Sita Distribution Project, among other things.

Karen M. Sandler

Karen M. Sandler is general counsel at the Software Freedom Law Center. She formerly worked as an associate in the corporate departments of Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher LLP in New York and Clifford Chance in New York and London. Sandler received her law degree from Columbia Law School in 2000, where she was a James Kent Scholar and co-founder of the Columbia Science and Technology Law Review. Sandler received her bachelor's degree in engineering from The Cooper Union. She is admitted to practice in the State of New York. She is also an officer of the Software Freedom Conservancy.

Karen M. Sandler serves as legal counsel (pro bono) for QuestionCopyright.org.

Kathleen M. Walsh

Kat Walsh is a law student at George Mason University, where she studies copyrights, patents, trademarks, and tech policy. She is currently the Executive Secretary of the Wikimedia Foundation, where she has been a board member since 2006 and a volunteer since 2004, working on issues such as licensing policy, privacy, outreach, communications, governance, and strategy. As of 2010, Walsh is a policy analyst at the American Library Association, Office of Information Technology Policy. In her secret double life, she plays bassoon and viola in a variety of ensembles for anyone who makes the mistake of sitting still long enough to listen.

Kat Walsh joined QuestionCopyright.org as a legal intern in February 2010.

Victor Cohen

Victor Cohen is currently a third-year law student at Brooklyn Law School with plans to enter into the copyright and internet/tech policy world upon graduation. To this end, he has focused his studies on copyright, telecom, privacy, free speech, and related issues. Victor has worked with web startups, artists, and activists through Brooklyn Law School's BLIP Clinic and with city government as an intern at (now former) New York City Councilmember Bill de Blasio's legislative office. He is an internet triumphalist, a huge fan of remix and mashup culture, and a former epeeist with the Lafayette College fencing team.

Victor Cohen joined QuestionCopyright.org as a legal intern in February 2010.

Barry Solow

Barry Solow was studying sociolinguistics at the University of Texas at Austin when, seeing too many fellow students getting jobs as cab drivers, he decided that a change of path was needed. After long, careful (and increasingly desperate) consideration he joined the U.S. Customs Service in NY to become an Import Specialist Assistant. In that capacity he helped defend our shores against the international flatware conspiracy and, almost single-handedly, protected us from the ravages of under-priced rawhide dog yummies. The romance was short-lived, however, as he soon heard the siren song of Electronic Computing. Over the course of the next twenty-two years he learned COBOL and became an Assistant Programmer, fell under the spell of Unix and shell programming, and ended up writing Perl programs and administering litigation databases in a bad part of town. Along the way he has written children's puppet shows, published bad prose poetry in an obscure literary journal, married and begotten two children.

Barry coordinates social networking services for QuestionCopyright.org. He is master of all things Identi.ca, Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, and other buzzwords yet to be invented.