Directory
Rashmi Rangnath, Director, Global Knowledge Initiative and Staff Attorney
contact | bioGigi B. Sohn, President and Co-Founder
contact | bio | resourcesPeter Suber, Director, Open Access Project
contact | bio | blog | home pageWhitney Tompkins, Executive Assistant
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Staff Bios
Art Brodsky
Communications Director
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Art Brodsky is communications director of Public Knowledge. He is a veteran of Washington, D.C. telecommunications and Internet journalism and public relations.
Art worked for 16 years with Communications Daily, a leading trade publication. He covered Congress through the passage of the Telecommunications Act of 1996, the Digital Millennium Copyright Act and other major pieces of legislation. He also covered telephone regulation at the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) and at state regulatory commissions. In addition, he has covered the online industry since before there was an Internet, coming in just after videotext died but before the World Wide Web. Art was later an editor with Congressional Quarterly, with responsibilities for the daily and Web coverage of telecom, tech and other issues. In addition to writing for Public Knowledge’s blog, Art’s work also appears on Web sites such as Huffington Post and TPM cafe. He has written for publications as diverse as the Washington Post, TomPaine.com, World Tennis magazine and the World Book encyclopedia. He was also a commentator on the public radio program, Marketplace, and appeared on C-SPAN, MSNBC and other media outlets.
On the PR front, Art worked as communications director for the National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA) and for the Washington, D.C. office of Qwest Communications International.
Art graduated from the University of Maryland in December 1973 with High Honors and a degree in government and politics. He received an MSJ degree in journalism from the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University in June 1975. He and his wife, Liz, live in Olney, MD. They have two daughters.
Scott Burns
Director, Information Technology
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Scott is Public Knowledge’s Information Technology Director. He is responsible for the development and operation of PK’s Internet presence and management of its IT infrastructure.
Prior to joining PK Scott was a long-time partner in Metasystems Design Group, Inc of Arlington, VA. MDG operated The Meta Network, one of the oldest online communities — started in 1983 — still in existence. While at MDG/TMN Scott set up and managed one of the first consumer dial-up IP internet service providers in the Washington, DC area. MDG merged into Caucus, Inc. in 1999, secured several rounds of venture capital, grew at a rapid rate and, like many other companies, crashed on the rocks of the dot-com bust of 2000-2001. Afterward he continued working as an independent consultant, developing and managing web-based community learning platforms for corporate clients, until joining PK early in 2005.
Scott earned a Bachelor of Science in Accounting and Business Administration from Michigan State University in 1986 and has held a GSEC Certification from the SANS Institute since 2001. He and his wife, Hope O’Keeffe, live with their two boys and assorted animals in Arlington, VA.
Alex Curtis
Director of Policy and New Media
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Alex is Public Knowledge’s Director of Policy and New Media. Before his position with PK, Alex developed an interest in public policy early in college. He interned for United States Senate Senator Mike DeWine — making DeWine the second U.S. Senator on the Internet by one day. He was asked to return in subsequent years and in addition to creating websites for both Senator DeWine and Senator George V. Voinovich, he also worked on legislative issues. While in law school, Alex clerked for the Antitrust Subcommittee of the Senate Judiciary Committee, working on issues such as Broadband, Digital Online Music, and Open Access.
Alex graduated from Wake Forest University in 1998 with a Bachelor of Science in Business Administration. He later earned his Juris Doctorate in 2001 from the University of Akron School of Law, where he focused on intellectual property.
Harold Feld
Legal Director
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Harold is Public Knowledge’s Legal Director. He is responsible for managing and mentoring PK’s growing legal team and acting as lead attorney for issues before the Federal Communications Commission and the courts. He is also lead attorney for the Public Interest Spectrum Coalition, of which PK is a proud member.
Before becoming Legal Director at Public Knowledge, Harold worked as Senior Vice President of Media Access Project, advocating for the public interest in media, telecommunications and technology policy for almost 10 years. Prior to joining MAP, Feld was an associate at Covington & Burling, worked on Freedom of Information Act, Privacy Act, and accountability issues at the Department of Energy, and clerked for the D.C. Court of Appeals. He received his B.A. from Princeton University, and his J.D. from Boston University Law School. Harold also writes Tales of the Sausage Factory, a progressive blog on media and telecom policy. In 2007, Illinois Senator Dick Durbin praised him and his blog for “[doing] a lot of great work helping people understand how FCC decisions affect people and communities on the ground.”
Mehan Jayasuriya
Policy Analyst
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Mehan is a policy analyst for Public Knowledge.
Prior to joining Public Knowledge, he worked as a technology journalist, covering topics such as consumer and enterprise technology and technology policy for publications like DailyTechRag, FierceCIO:TechWatch, FierceMobileIT and the Future of Music Coalition Blog. He also moonlights as a music critic/photographer and serves as a regular columnist for DCist and PopMatters. Before starting his career in tech journalism, Mehan worked as an English teacher in Aomori Prefecture, Japan, as part of the JET Program. He earned a B.A. with honors in East Asian Languages and Civilizations from the University of Chicago in 2005. You can visit his personal website at mehanjayasuriya.com.
Jef Pearlman
Equal Justice Works Fellow
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Jef is an Equal Justice Works Fellow and was awarded the 2007 Ennis Foundation’s Fellowship for First Amendment Law to support his work on free speech in telecommunications and media law at Public Knowledge. He is also a member of the California State Bar, and assists Public Knowledge as a staff attorney.
Prior to joining Public Knowledge, Jef earned Bachelors and Masters from M.I.T. in computer science, and spent several years working as a programmer in the telecommunications industry. After developing an interest in technology and intellectual property law, he attended Stanford Law School, interning at Public Knowledge and EFF along the way, and earning his J.D. in 2006. Jef then spent the next year clerking for the Honorable Judge William W Schwarzer in the Northern District of California, working on both District Court and Court of Appeals cases, and joined Public Knowledge in October 2007.
Rashmi Rangnath
Director, Global Knowledge Initiative and Staff Attorney
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Prior to joining Public Knowledge as a Staff Attorney, Rashmi Rangnath was a part time Law Clerk for special projects as well as a student Intern, working on copyright and patent law issues. Ms. Rangnath has also worked at the Association of Research Libraries as a student intern, where she mainly worked on the orphan works project.
Rashmi Rangnath received her Bachelors in Academic Laws (B.A. equivalent) in 1998 and LL.B. (J.D. equivalent) in 2000 from Mysore University, Mysore, India. After getting married and coming to the U.S., Rashmi received her LL.M. degree in International Legal Studies with a specialization in International and Comparative Protection of Intellectual Property from American University Washington College of Law in 2006.
Sherwin Siy
Deputy Legal Director
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Sherwin Siy is Staff Attorney and Director of the Global Knowledge Initiative at Public Knowledge, where he focuses on emerging copyright issues and international effects on IP and technology policy. Before joining PK, he served as Staff Counsel at the Electronic Privacy Information Center, working on consumer and communications issues.
Sherwin received his JD, with a Certificate in Law and Technology from UC Berkeley’s Boalt Hall School of Law. While in law school, he also worked on a variety of IP issues through the Samuelson Law, Technology, and Public Policy Clinic, including library copying rights and the legitimate uses of P2P file sharing.
Gigi B. Sohn
President and Co-Founder
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Gigi Sohn is an internationally known communications attorney. In September 2001, she founded Public Knowledge with Laurie Racine (then President of the Center for the Public Domain) and activist/author David Bollier.
Gigi serves as PK’s chief strategist, fundraiser and public face. She is frequently quoted in the New York Times, Washington Post and Wall Street Journal, as well as in trade and local press. Gigi has been published in the Washington Post, Variety, CNET and Legal Times. In addition, she has appeared on numerous television and radio programs, including the Today Show, The McNeil-Lehrer Report, C-SPAN’s Washington Journal and National Public Radio’s All Things Considered and Morning Edition.
Gigi is a Senior Adjunct Fellow at the Silicon Flatirons Center for Law, Technology and Entrepreneurship at the University of Colorado and a Senior Fellow at the University of Melbourne Faculty of Law, Graduate Studies Program in Australia. She has been a Non-Resident Fellow at the University of Southern California Annenberg Center, and an Adjunct Professor at Georgetown University and at the Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law, Yeshiva University.
Gigi served as a Project Specialist in the Ford Foundation’s Media, Arts and Culture unit and as Executive Director of the Media Access Project, a public interest law firm that represents citizens’ rights before the FCC and the courts. In 1997, President Clinton appointed Gigi to serve as a member of his Advisory Committee on the Public Interest Obligations of Digital Television Broadcasters. In May 2006, the Electronic Frontier Foundation gave Gigi its Internet “Pioneer” Award.
Gigi currently serves on the board of the Telecommunications Policy Research Conference (TPRC) and Broadcasters’ Child Development Center (BCDC). She is a member of the advisory board of the Future of Music Coalition and the Center for Public Integrity’s “Well Connected” Telecommunications Project. Gigi served on the District of Columbia Bar Board of Governors from 1997-2000.
Gigi holds a B.S. in Broadcasting and Film, Summa Cum Laude, from the Boston University College of Communication and a J.D. from the University of Pennsylvania Law School.
Peter Suber
Director, Open Access Project
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Peter Suber is the Open Access Project Director at Public Knowledge, a public-interest advocacy group in Washington D.C. focusing on information policy. He’s also a Research Professor of Philosophy at Earlham College and Senior Researcher at the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition (SPARC). He has a Ph.D. in philosophy and a J.D. from Northwestern University. He is the author of the SPARC Open Access Newsletter and editor of the Open Access News weblog. He was the principal drafter of the Budapest Open Access Initiative, and sits on the Steering Committee of the Scientific Information Working Group of the U.N. World Summit on the Information Society, the Advisory Board of American Library Association Information Commons, and the Board of Governors of the International Consortium for the Advancement of Academic Publishing. Lingua Franca magazine named him one of “Academia’s 20 Most Wired Faculty” in 1999. He has been active in promoting open access for many years through his research, writing, speaking, and other forms of advocacy.
Michael Weinberg
Law Clerk
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Michael Weinberg joined Public Knowledge as a full-time Law Clerk (soon to be Staff Attorney) after two years as a part-time Law Clerk and Student Intern. Although he is involved in a wide range of issues at Public Knowledge, he focuses primarily on copyright and issues before the FCC.
Michael received his J.D. from The George Washington University Law School where he was awarded the ABA-BNA Award for Excellence in the Study of Intellectual Property Law. Prior to GW he worked in New Delhi and Beijing, and received a B.A. with honors in History and Government from Claremont McKenna College.
