sub-navigation
People
About
People
Creative Commons is a growing collaborative effort led by a core of directors, advisors, and staff. Read more about our team below.
Board of Directors
Technical Advisory Board |
Staff |
Berlin Office Interns/Volunteers |
Board of Directors
Hal Abelson
Harold (Hal) Abelson is Class of 1922 Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at MIT and a Fellow of the IEEE. He holds an A.B. degree from Princeton University and a Ph.D. degree in mathematics from MIT. He joined the MIT faculty in 1973. In 1992, Abelson was designated as one of MIT's six inaugural MacVicar Faculty Fellows, in recognition of his significant and sustained contributions to teaching and undergraduate education. Abelson was recipient in 1992 of the Bose Award (MIT's School of Engineering teaching award). Abelson is also the winner of the 1995 Taylor L. Booth Education Award given by IEEE Computer Society, cited for his continued contributions to the pedagogy and teaching of introductory computer science. He was also a founding director of the Free Software Foundation, and he serves as consultant to Hewlett-Packard Laboratories. He is co-director of the MIT-Microsoft Research Alliance in educational technology, and co-head of the MIT Council on Educational Technology. Website: swissnet.ai.mit.edu/users/hal
back to people
James Boyle
James Boyle is a Professor of Law at Duke Law School. He writes on intellectual property, cyberspace, and social and legal theory. He is also a member of the academic Advisory Board of the Electronic Privacy and Information Center. Website: http://www.james-boyle.com
back to people
Michael Carroll
Michael Carroll is an Assistant Professor of Law at the Villanova University School of Law, where he teaches courses on intellectual property and the law of the Internet. Prior to joining the faculty in 2001, Professor Carroll was an attorney in the Washington, D.C. office of Wilmer, Cutler & Pickering. His practice focused on intellectual property and Internet-related issues. Carroll received his A.B. with general honors from the University of Chicago and his J.D. magna cum laude from the Georgetown University Law Center. He also served as a law clerk to Judge Judith W. Rogers of the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit and Judge Joyce Hens Green of the United States District Court for the District of Columbia. Before attending law school, Carroll worked as a journalist, a high school teacher in Zimbabwe, and a program officer for democracy and governance projects in Africa.
back to people
Eric Eldred
Eric Eldred is editor and publisher of Eldritch Press, a free online book website at http://www.ibiblio.org/eldritch. He is better known as lead plaintiff in Eldred v. Ashcroft, a suit to overturn the 1998 Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act. He is best known as father of triplet girls. A former Unix systems administrator, he is now disabled. As a computer hobbyist and early adopter since about 1980, he led computer user groups and wrote articles for various computer magazines. He worked 19 years at Massachusetts General Hospital before entering the computer field with Apollo Computer.
back to people
Davis Guggenheim
Davis Guggenheim is a director and producer of both documentary and
dramatic film and television.
In 1999, he undertook an ambitious project documenting the challenging first year of several novice public school teachers. Two films resulted from this intensive immersion in the Los Angeles public school system: The First Year and Teach. Both films sought to address the tremendous need for qualified teachers in California and nationwide and to create awareness of the crisis -- as well as to inspire a new generation to become teachers.
Davis was an Executive Producer on Training Day and directed a feature film called Gossip, both for Warner Bros. His television directing credits include recently completed episodes of "The Shield," "Alias" and "24" as well as such critically acclaimed programs as "NYPD Blue," "ER," and "Party of Five." He is currently a Producer and Director of the upcoming HBO series "Deadwood."
Guggenheim's other documentary films include Norton Simon: A Man
and His Art, produced for permanent exhibition at the Norton
Simon Museum, and JFK and the Imprisoned Child, produced for
permanent exhibition at the John F. Kennedy Library. Guggenheim wrote
and edited many films with his father, four-time Academy Award winner
Charles Guggenheim. Davis graduated from Brown University in 1986.
back to people
Joi Ito
Joichi Ito is the founder and CEO of Neoteny, a venture capital firm focused on personal communications and enabling technologies. He has created numerous Internet companies including PSINet Japan, Digital Garage and Infoseek Japan. In 1997 Time ranked him as a member of the CyberElite. In 2000 he was ranked among the "50 Stars of Asia" by Business Week and commended by the Japanese Ministry of Posts and Telecommunications for supporting the advancement of IT. In 2001 the World Economic Forum chose him as one of the 100 "Global Leaders of Tomorrow" for 2002.
back to people
Lawrence Lessig
Lawrence Lessig, Chairman of the Board of Directors of Creative Commons, is a Professor of Law at Stanford Law School and founder of the School's Center for Internet and Society. In 2002, he was named one of 50 top innovators by Scientific American. Lessig earned a B.A. in economics and a B.S. in management from the University of Pennsylvania, an M.A. in philosophy from Cambridge, and a J.D. from Yale.
back to people
Eric Saltzman
A 1972 graduate of Harvard Law School, Eric F. Saltzman began his career as a criminal defense attorney in Seattle's and Boston's public defender offices. While teaching in Harvard Law School's Criminal Trial Advocacy program, Saltzman took up filmmaking at MIT's renowned Film Section and re-created trials as teaching tools. Moving from re-creation to verite, Saltzman introduced cameras into actual courtrooms with The Shooting of Big Man: Anatomy of a Criminal Case (a two hour special on ABC News in 1979, now available for Creative Commons license here). For CBS News, he produced and directed Miami: The Trial That Sparked the Riots, an investigation of a police homicide, its cover-up, and the ultimate trial of the police officers. These and other films have won Emmy and ABA Silver Gavel awards, among others. In the mid-1980s, Saltzman moved into the film business and began acquiring and licensing libraries of classic motion picture and television rights for emerging media such as cable, microwave and satellite transmission. In 2000-2002, Saltzman was executive director of Harvard's Berkman Center for Internet & Society. He is a member of the bars of Washington State and the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, and on the boards of not-for-profits in the area of race and poverty and the extension of Internet services to the human rights and legal services sectors. He lives with his wife and two boys in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
back to people
Molly Shaffer Van Houweling
Formerly the Executive Director of Creative Commons and a fellow at Stanford Law School's Center for Internet & Society, Molly Shaffer Van Houweling is Assistant Professor at the University of Michigan Law School. Van Houweling graduated in June 1998 from Harvard Law School, where she was Articles Editor of the Harvard Journal of Law & Technology. Following graduation, Ms. Van Houweling was a fellow at the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard Law School, and one of the first staff members at the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN). She then served as a law clerk to Judge Michael Boudin, of the United States Court of Appeals for the First Circuit, and Justice David Souter of the United States Supreme Court.
back to people
Technical Advisory Board
Barbara Fox
Barbara Fox is a Senior Software Architect, Cryptography and Digital Rights
Management for Microsoft Corporation.
She is also currently a Senior Fellow
at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard.
She serves on the National
Academies of Science Committee on "Authentication Technologies and Their
Implications for Privacy," the Technical Advisory Board of "The Creative
Commons," and the Board of Directors of the International Financial
Cryptography Association. Ms. Fox joined Microsoft in 1993 as Director of
Advanced Product Development and led the company's electronic commerce
technology development group. She has co-authored Internet standards in the
areas of Public Key Infrastructure and XML security. Her research at Harvard
focuses on digital copyright law, public policy, and privacy.
Immediately prior to Microsoft, Ms. Fox was President of SystemSoft America,
a Macintosh software development company in Palo Alto, California, and in
addition she was a consultant to Visa International. Between 1981 and 1984,
she was Engineering Development Manager for AppleTalk at Apple Computer.
back to people
Don McGovern
Don McGovern is a Senior Fellow at the Berkman Center for Internet & Society. Prior to joining the Berkman Center, Don was the World Wide R&D Manager for Hewlett-Packard Operations (HPO). In this capacity he was responsible for managing the five software engineering laboratories of HPO. McGovern has been a board director of X/Open Company Limited, the Open Software Foundation (OSF), and the X Consortium. He is currently on the board development committee at the Shady Hill School in Cambridge, MA, and is a head coach for the Beacon Hill community girl's softball league. Don is married, has three children, and resides in Boston, MA.
back to people
Eric Miller
Eric Miller is the Activity Lead for the W3C World Wide Web Consortium's Semantic Web Initiative. Before joining the W3C, Eric was a Senior Research Scientist at OCLC Online Computer Library Center, Inc., and the co-founder and Associate Director of the The Dublin Core Metadata Initiative, an open forum engaged in the development of interoperable online metadata standards that support a broad range of purposes and business models. Eric holds a Research Scientist appointment at MIT's Laboratory for Computer Science.
back to people
Ben Adida
Ben Adida is a PhD candidate at MIT in the Cryptography and Information
Security group. Ben began building web applications in 1995. He was a
founding member of ArsDigita, the OpenACS free community web software
project, and OpenForce. Ben was Creative Commons's first CTO and is
currently the Creative Commons representative to the W3C.
back to people
Staff
Lawrence Lessig, CEO
full bio above
back to people
John Wilbanks, Executive Director of Science Commons
Started: Oct 2004
John Wilbanks comes to Creative Commons from a Fellowship at the World Wide Web Consortium in Semantic Web for Life Sciences. Previously, he founded and led to acquisition Incellico, a bioinformatics company that built semantic graph networks for use in pharmaceutical discovery. Before founding Incellico, John was the first Assistant Director at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard Law School and also spent time in Washington, DC, USA as a legislative aide to U.S. Representative Fortney ("Pete") Stark. John holds a Bachelor of Arts in Philosophy from Tulane University.
back to people
Thinh Nguyen, Science Commons Counsel
Started: Mar 2006
As Counsel for Science Commons, Thinh is responsible
for advising on legal issues relating to Science Commons and for
implementing its strategy and operations. Thinh joined Science Commons
after working as licensing attorney, and then corporate counsel, for
Business Objects, a maker of business intelligence and reporting software.
He also worked as licensing attorney for Crystal Decisions, Inc., prior to
its acquisition by Business Objects. Before that, he practiced as an
associate in the Technology Transactions Group of Wilson, Sonsini,
Goodrich & Rosati, a Silicon Valley law firm, where his work focused
mainly on licensing transactions involving strategic collaborations and
joint ventures, particularly in life sciences. Thinh received a Bachelor
of Arts in chemistry from Harvard University in 1996 and a J.D. from
Harvard Law School in 1999. He is admitted to practice in California.
back to people
Mia Garlick, General Counsel
Started: Mar 2005
As General Counsel, Mia oversees implementation of the domestic and international legal strategy for Creative Commons and advises on ongoing legal issues that arise in relation to Creative Commons licenses and activities.
Mia joined Creative Commons after working in the Silicon Valley office of the law firm Simpson Thatcher and Bartlett on a range of shareholder and securities, antitrust and intellectual property litigation matters. Prior this, Mia completed a Masters of Law at Stanford, specializing in Law, Science, and Technology, to deepen her knowledge of IP and technology issues. Before her Stanford studies, Mia worked as an IP associate in the Sydney office of Gilbert & Tobin Lawyers. Throughout her legal career, Mia has regularly acted on a pro bono basis for individual creators, giving them legal advice on IP and related issues. Mia has also written numerous articles on current issues in IP and technology law and presented frequently on these issues.
Mia received a Bachelor of Arts and a Bachelor of Laws from the University of New South Wales in 1998 and her Masters of Law from Stanford Law School in 2003. She is admitted to practice in New South Wales, Australia, and in California, US.
back to people
Natalie Walrond, CFO and Treasurer
Started: Aug 2005
Natalie Walrond joined Creative Commons in August 2005 as CFO and Treasurer
after a year long sabbatical from the investment industry. Natalie spent
four years in on the buy side following and managing publicly traded
investments in emerging economies and five years on the sell side as an
equity research analyst. She graduated from Trinity University in 1993 with
a degree in International Studies and International Business and from the
University of Chicago in 1995 with an MBA in Analytic Finance and Policy
Studies.
back to people
Francesca Rodriquez, Project Manager
Started: Jul 2004
Francesca Rodriquez is a Project Manager at Creative Commons, formerly the Office Manager. Her favorite thing about working at Creative Commons is talking to the public and getting them psyched about CC and giving away free CC schwag. She has worked in museum education at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the Museum of International Folk Art, The Georgia O?Keeffe Museum and The Art Institute of Chicago. Francesca holds a BA in Studio Art from the College of Santa Fe, and an MA from the University of Chicago in humanities and art history. She likes volunteering to help the Hispanic community, eating fish tacos, pilates, and listening to baseball on the radio with her partner.
back to people
Jennifer Yip, Office Manager
Started: Oct 2005
Jennifer Yip comes to Creative Commons after having lived in San Francisco for two years while working at the Mechanics' Institute as Membership coordinator. She graduated from the University of Michigan with a Bachelors' degree in Anthropology. After continuing to work for the University of Michigan Health System, she decided to leave the land of seven month coldness. She now enjoys the city's plethora of restaurants, shopping and live performance, drives along Highway 1, and snowboarding at the Lake Tahoe resorts. She also
volunteers at the Asian Art Museum of San Francisco.
back to people
Mike Linksvayer, CTO
Started: Apr 2003
Mike Linksvayer has ten years' experience as an enterprise software, web, and multimedia developer and consultant. He co-founded Bitzi and holds a B.A. in economics from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
back to people
Eric Steuer, Creative Director
Started: Nov 2005
Eric develops cultural and educational projects for Creative Commons. He is a contributing editor at Wired and has written about music for Urb and Soma. Eric is co-founder of the Sneakmove record label and is a member of the hip-hop group Meanest Man Contest.
back to people
Alex Roberts, Graphic Designer
Started: Nov 2005
Alex Roberts is the graphic designer for Creative Commons, in charge of graphics on the web and in print. He graduated from the Art Institute of California — San Francisco, and brings with him many years of experience in the open source, and design fields. Originally from England, he now lives in San Francisco, enjoying photography and developing open source software.
back to people
Diane Cabell, Corporate Counsel
Started: 2001
Diane Cabell, the Secretary and Corporate Counsel for Creative Commons, was the founder of the Clinical Program in Cyberlaw at the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard Law School. She is a co-director of Chlling Effects and sits on the advisory boards of the Canadian Internet Policy and Public Interest Clinic (CIPPIC) at University of Ottawa and the Center for Law and Innovation at the University of Maine School of Law.
back to people
Elaine Adolfo, Assistant
Started: Jul 2004
Elaine Adolfo is the assistant for Lawrence Lessig and Creative Commons. After graduating from UC Berkeley
with a degree in English Literature, she worked as a web producer for CMP, Beatnik, Macromedia and Apple. She's written music and feature stories for college papers and LA Weekly. She also won an award from Rolling Stone magazine for a story she wrote on the horrors of finding dates on the Internet. She has a really cool dog named Mr. Bojangles.
back to people
Nathan Yergler, Software Engineer
Started: Jun 2004
Nathan Yergler (yergler.net) is a software engineer for the Creative Commons. He joins Creative Commons from a faculty position at Canterbury School, where he pioneered the use of Python in their Computer Science courses, developing both introductory and advanced elective curricula. A frequent presenter at PyCon, the Python community conference, Nathan enjoys exploring new problem domains and developing new skills to meet specific challenges. He lives in Fort Wayne, Indiana (by choice) and will receive a B.S. in Computer Science from IPFW in May, 2006.
back to people
Jon Phillips, Open Source Developer
Started: Sep 2005
Jon Phillips is an open source developer, artist and scholar with 12+ years of experience building communities and working within computing culture. He is currently developing the Open Source project the Open Clip Art Library, works for Creative Commons and teaches at the San Francisco Art Institute in the Design+Technology department.
back to people
Heather Ford, Acting Executive Director, iCommons
Started: Mar 2006
Heather Ford is a South African who has worked in the fields of internet policy, law and management in South Africa, the United Kingdom and the United States. Heather graduated from Rhodes University with a Bachelor of Journalism degree and has a certificate in Telecommunications Policy, Law and Management from the University of the Witwatersrand Link Centre. After working in the United Kingdom for Greennet and Privacy International, she went on to Stanford University in 2003 where she worked as a fellow in the Reuters Digital Vision Fellowship Program. Volunteering for Creative Commons while she was at Stanford, she decided to go back to South Africa at the end of her studies to start Creative Commons South Africa and a programme entitled 'Commons-sense: Towards an African Digital Information Commons' at the Wits University Link Centre. Recently appointed Acting Executive Director of iCommons, Heather is also helping to help establish an Intellectual Property Research Unit at the Link Centre and a new NGO called 'The African Commons Project'.
back to people
Berlin Office
Christiane Henckel von Donnersmarck, Creative Commons International Executive Director
Started: Apr 2003
Christiane Henckel von Donnersmarck studied law at Heidelberg University,
where she developed a particualar interest in the phenomenon of the
Knowledge Society. In 1994 she organized a 3-day-symposium with 600
participants for the "Heidelberger Club" entitled "Challenges of the
Information Society." When she continued her Law Studies at Humboldt University
in Berlin, she became Research Assistant to Professor Tomuschat, Chair
of the International Law Department. Upon graduation in 1998 she
obtained a scholarship from the Max Planck Institute
in Munich to write a doctorate on "Copyright Limitations in the Digital
Age." This allowed her to combine her passion for the Arts with her
experience in International Law and her interest in the Information
Society. In May of 2002, she was part of a team that helped the
Ministry of Justice implement the European InfoSoc Directive into German Law. Christiane has held various teaching assignments and has published widely on copyright law.
back to people
Eva Lutterbuese, Creative Commons International Executive Assistant
Started: Sept 2005
Eva is the Executive Assistant to Christiane Henckel von Donnersmarck and Creative Commons International.
After a 3-year apprenticeship at a German automotive supplier she
started to work as an Assistant at the CDU party headquarter in Bonn.
She also worked several years for a member of the German parliament.
Her last position was the Executive Assistance to the President of a
governmental agency, which tries to attract foreign investors to
eastern Germany. She has a lot of experience in administration, data
management and communication. Eva also holds a teaching certificate for
office administration and time management.
back to people
Tessi Rieber, Intern
Started: Apr 2005
Tessi Rieber joined the Berlin office in April 2 2005 as a student
intern. After studying in Freiburg, Cologne and Paris, Tessi is now a
student of History at the Humboldt University of Berlin.
back to people
Interns/Volunteers
Cory Doctorow, Creative Commons International Evangelist
Cory Doctorow (craphound.com) is the UK Liason for Creative Commons, working with institutional British rightsholders on open content licensing projects. He is an award-winning science fiction writer, author of Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom, Eastern Standard Tribe and A Place So Foreign and Eight More. He is a Contributing Writer to Wired Magazine and is the co-editor of the weblog Boing Boing. Born and raised in Toronto, he now lives in London, England.
back to people
Aaron Swartz, Volunteer Metadata Advisor
Aaron Swartz is a teenage writer, programmer, and hacker. As a Semantic Web developer, he's a member of the W3C's RDF Core Working Group and a co-author of RSS 1.0. His latest project is the Plesh, a decentralized network that will provide the platform for the next generation of network applications.
back to people
