RSVP for this free event today.

6:00pm Reception - Neukom Faculty Lounge - Neukom Building
7:00pm Panel - Room 290 - Law School Building

Live streaming through UStream will be available and a final video recording will be available on our YouTube channel.

---

A growing chorus of opposition has emerged around the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) now pending in the House, as well as its Senate counterpart, the PROTECT-IP Act. If enacted, SOPA would provide unprecedented power for law enforcement and private actors to force service providers to block access to internet sites or shut off revenue streams. This panel will explore the potential impact of SOPA on Silicon Valley, the concerns that have been voiced by legal scholars, technology companies, entrepreneurs, engineers and venture capitalists, and what the technology sector can do to make a difference in the outcome of this bill.

Panelists:

Mark Lemley - William H. Neukom Professor of Law, Stanford Law School, the Director of the Stanford Program in Law, Science and Technology, and the Director of Stanford's LLM Program in Law, Science and Technology. He teaches intellectual property, computer and Internet law, patent law, and antitrust. He is the author of seven books (most in multiple editions) and 119 articles on these and related subjects, including the two-volume treatise IP and Antitrust.

Josh Mendelsohn - Partner, Hattery. A veteran of a number of Silicon Valley companies, Josh's career has been largely focused on startups and nonprofits and helping them scale to support growing customer and user bases. Previously, Josh spent six years as a Program Manager at Google after starting his career with the Federal Government at the Department of the Treasury and Department of Defense. Josh has an A.B. in Government from Harvard University.

David Ulevitch - Founder & CEO, OpenDNS. Named one of BusinessWeek Magazine's "Most Promising Entrepreneurs Under 30". In the time since its 2006 launch, OpenDNS has become the world's largest and fastest-growing DNS service provider. Today the company helps millions of people around the world, including students and employees at tens of thousands of schools and businesses, navigate the Internet safer, faster, smarter and more reliably.

Paul Vixie - Chairman and Chief Scientist, Internet Systems Consortium. He authored the standard UNIX system programs SENDS, proxynet, rtty and Vixie cron. In 1988, while employed by the Digital Equipment Corporation, he started working on the popular internet domain name server BIND, of which he was the primary author and architect, until release 8. After he left DEC in 1994, he founded Internet Software Consortium (ISC) together with Rick Adams and Carl Malamud to support BIND and other software for the Internet. The activities of ISC were assumed by a new company, Internet Systems Consortium in 2004. Although ISC operates the F root server, Vixie at one point joined the Open Root Server Network (ORSN) project and operated their L root server.

Fred von Lohmann - Senior Copyright Counsel, Google. Before joining Google in July 2010, Fred was a senior staff attorney with the Electronic Frontier Foundation, specializing in intellectual property matters. Fred has received the California Lawyer of the Year Award, the American Library Association's 2010 L. Ray Patterson Copyright Award and recognition as one of 2010's "25 Most Influential People in IP" by both The American Lawyer and Billboard magazines.

Albert Wenger - Partner, Union Square Ventures. As an entrepreneur, he has founded or co-founded five companies, including a management consulting firm (in Germany), a hosted data analytics company, a technology subsidiary for Telebanc (now E*Tradebank), an early stage investment firm, and most recently (with his wife), DailyLit, a service for reading books by email or RSS. Albert also served as the president of del.icio.us through the company's sale to Yahoo.

Moderated by Anthony Falzone - Executive Director, Fair Use Project at the Center for Internet and Society. As an intellectual property litigator, he has defended artists, writers, publishers, filmmakers, musicians, record labels and video game makers against copyright, trademark, rights of publicity and other intellectual property claims. Tony represents conductor Lawrence Golan in his challenge to Congress's constitutional power to remove works from the public domain, which he argued before the Supreme Court of the United States.