Pamela S. Chestek is the principal of Chestek Legal in Raleigh, North Carolina. She counsels creative communities on open source, brand, marketing and copyright matters. Prior to returning to private practice, she held in-house positions at footwear, apparel, and high technology companies and was an adjunct law professor teaching a course on trademark law and unfair competition. She is a frequent author of scholarly articles, and her blog, Property, Intangible, provides analysis of current intellectual property case law.
Pam has extensive experience in the open source community, in particular dealing with the challenge of managing brand identity and consumer expectation in a culture rooted in free access, collaboration and sharing.
Pam has a Bachelor of Fine Arts from Penn State and a Juris Doctor from the Western New England University School of Law. She is admitted to practice in Connecticut, the District of Columbia, Massachusetts, New York and North Carolina.
Olivier Hugot is a member of the New York (2003) and Paris (2004) Bars. He advises and represents French and foreign companies in the areas of Internet, luxury and creation. He assists many innovative Internet entrepreneurs and companies, both in formalizing their projects as well as in development during fundraising.
He advises clients in connection with the protection and exploitation of their rights in compliance with the constantly evolving internet regulations. Olivier has extensive experience in the practical and legal problems of the internet, both with counseling and litigation. He has also developed a particular expertise in the legal aspects of free culture.
Olivier has presented his work at a number of conferences, particularly pertaining to free licenses (GNU/GPL, Creative Commons) as well at Wikimania 2008, the annual international conference of the Wikimedia Foundation. Olivier is also a masters instructor at the University of Paris I La Sorbonne and a member of the associations INTA and IAEL.
Daniel B. Ravicher is a Lecturer in Law at Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law. He has published numerous legal articles and given dozens of presentations regarding Free and Open Source Software legal issues and served as lead counsel for free and open source software developers in the only GPL enforcement lawsuits ever brought in the United States. Professor Ravicher has been labeled a modern day ‘Robin Hood’ by Science magazine, awarded an Echoing Green Fellowship for social entrepreneurship, named to both Managing Intellectual Property magazine's ‘50 Most Influential People in IP’ list and IP Law & Business magazine's ‘Top 50 Under 45’ list and twice invited to testify before Congress on issues of technology legal policy. Professor Ravicher received his law degree from the University of Virginia School of Law, where he was the Franklin O'Blechman Scholar of his class, a Mortimer Caplin Public Service Award recipient and an Editor of the Virginia Journal of Law and Technology, and his bachelors degree in materials science magna cum laude with University Honors from the University of South Florida. Professor Ravicher writes for The Huffington Post and Seeking Alpha and is admitted to the United States Supreme Court, the Courts of Appeals for the Federal, 2nd and 11th Circuits, the District Courts for the Southern and Eastern Districts of New York, the State of New York, and the United States Patent and Trademark Office. Professor Ravicher is also the Executive Director of the Public Patent Foundation.
EIP is a leading Intellectual Property Law firm advising on all areas of intellectual property. Founded in 2000, EIP has 23 partners and more than 130 staff practicing from its four UK offices in Bath, Cardiff, Leeds and London, its U.S. office in San Diego, California, and its German office in Düsseldorf. EIP’s combination of patent, trademark and design attorneys with specialist IP litigators is highly unusual in the UK legal services market, and presents its clients with significant advantages, including the ability to offer advice on all stages of IP protection and rights enforcement, including cross-border litigation in the UK and Germany, and prosecution in the UK and US. Attorneys and litigators combine with in-house IP strategy and patent searching capabilities to offer advice on the entire IP life cycle. EIP won the Queen’s Award for Enterprise 2013, in the category of Outstanding Achievement in recognition of having increased its overseas sales by 136% over a three year period. EIP is a Legal 500, Chambers & Partners, and IAM Patent 1000 recommended firm.
Directors Emeriti of the Software Freedom Conservancy are former members of Conservancy's Board of Directors who continue to support Conservancy's mission and occasionally advise Conservancy.
Stormy Peter is passionate about open source software and educates companies and communities on how open source software is changing the software industry. She is a compelling speaker who engages her audiences during and after her presentations and frequently speaks on business aspects of open source software. Stormy worked for OpenLogic, the GNOME Foundation and Mozilla.
Peter Brown has worked in non-profit management and finance for more than twenty years. He served as the Executive Director of the Free Software Foundation from 2005 until 2011, and previously as its Financial Controller and GPL Compliance Lab Manager. Peter has also been a Director of New Internationalist Publications Cooperative, and worked in London for BBC Network Radio.
Loïc Dachary has been involved with the Free Software Movement since 1987, when he started distributing GNU tapes to the general public in France. In 2012, he founded Upstream University, a nonprofit with the goal of teaching developers how to contribute easily and efficiently. Dachary volunteers as a developer for April, a grassroots organization promoting Free Software. He maintains April's OpenStack cluster and organizes contributions with agile methods. As President of FSF France, he also provides technical and legal resources to French Free Software developers. His day job is to use and contribute to Ceph within OpenStack.
Ian Lance Taylor began working with free software in 1990. He wrote the popular free Taylor UUCP package and has contributed to a wide range of free software projects, particularly the GNU compiler and binary utilities. He worked with free software at Cygnus Solutions, Zembu Labs, Wasabi Systems, and C2 Microsystems, and currently does GNU compiler and tools development at Google. He received a B.S. in Computer Science from Yale University.
Tom Tromey started working on free software in 1991. He was the primary author of GNU Automake, and has also worked on a wide range of other free software projects. He is currently a maintainer of GNU gcj and works at Red Hat. He received a B.S. in mathematics from the California Institute of Technology.
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