Tag: Public Knowledge

Following Alex’s lead, I’ve decided that perhaps I too owe the readers of the PK blog an introduction. My name is Mehan Jayasuriya and I recently joined Public Knowledge full-time as a policy analyst, though I’ve been working as a contributing blogger for PK for a few months now. Like Alex, I originally hail from the Midwest, specifically, southeastern Wisconsin. After graduating from the University of Chicago and living in Japan for a year, I landed in the world of Washington D.C. tech journalism, which eventually brought me to Public Knowledge. With regard to policy issues, my primary areas of interest are network neutrality, open wireless networks and devices and copyright reform. If you’ve got any questions or comments for me, feel free to let me know in the comments.

We’re now accepting nominations for our annual IP3 Awards. Each year, Public Knowledge singles out three people who have advanced the public interest in one or more of the “three IPs”: Intellectual Property, Internet Protocol, and Information Policy.

As technology advances, the roles of users, content creators, and service providers expand and blur. This year, more than ever, the areas have overlapped in debates around patents, copyright, net neutrality on the Internet and on other networks, the use of spectrum, and many others. As new questions arise at the intersection of law and technology, certain individuals come forward to advance to public interest in each of the three types of “IP”.

As always, we need your help in choosing this year’s winners. So please send your nominations to IP3nominees@publicknowledge.org, or post your picks in the comments below.

After weeks of speculation, PK Advisory Board member Larry Lessig announced today that he is considering running for the Congressional seat of the late Rep. Tom Lantos, who represented California’s 12th District. Over the past few weeks, a Draft Lessig Change Congress website and a Facebook group along the same lines have sprouted up.

A full 10 days later, and I still haven’t fully recovered from the 2008 CES. While I agree with folks like David Pogue that there weren’t many brand new innovations that would knock your socks off, there were a lot of improvements on old ones. TVs and computers got thinner, storage capacity got bigger and the telephone became just one application in multi-use devices that play music, broadcast over-the-air TV, provide GPS services and more. Equally as important, CES is a time to have fun and get to know better the government, industry, artists and public interest folks with which PK works. Here are some snapshots from the show:

This was my “best in show.” This Sony 11 inch O.L.E.D. High Definition TV set completely changed my expectations for Digital TV. For the past 10 years I’ve been saying that a viewer cannot tell the difference between HD and Standard Definition TV on anything less than a 36 inch screen. I was wrong. The ultra thin 27 inch prototype (below, after the jump), was also amazing.

Alex, Sherwin and I will spending most of this week at the International Consumer Electronics Show, otherwise known as CES. We’ll be trying to see what are the cool new technologies and trends and to consider their policy implications. The show is massive, the biggest trade show in the world, with nearly three thousand exhibits and 150,000+ attendees taking up the entire Las Vegas Convention Center and Sands Expo and Convention Center, as well as parts of the Hilton, Renaissance, and Venetian hotels.

We’ve decided to get aggressive about social platforms here at PK. For a while, we’ve had a facebook group, and now we’ve started a Ning Public Knowledge group. Each offers something a little different. At facebook, you’ve got the large communities of people who are already invested in the platform. I’m hoping that they allow for group administrators to embed applications into group pages (until they do, we’ll keep manually inputting our content). That’s actually what I think the Ning group offers more of, is the ability to syndicate content.

I’m Public Knowledge’s newest full-time staff member, and I just wanted to say hello and give a brief introduction. I’m here as the Bruce J. Ennis fellow through Equal Justice Works. I’ll be filing amicus briefs on Public Knowledge’s behalf in cases which affect free speech, as well as helping out on other issues like broadband policy as they come up. A more detailed bio can be found on the staff page.

Looking forward to working with everyone in here and out there to keep speech free and innovation flowing.

Public Knowledge President Gigi B. Sohn today announced the addition of two new staff members for the organization.

Jef Pearlman is an Equal Justice Works fellow for the next two years. He is a 1999 graduate of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, earned a Master’s degree from MIT in computer science in 2000 and received his law degree from Stanford Law School in 2006. Jef will be working on amicus briefs, FCC filings and broadband issues.

Rashmi Rangnath, a PK Law Clerk, received her Bachelors in Academic Laws (B.A. equivalent) in 1998 and her LL.B. (J.D. equivalent) from the University of Mysore in 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. Rashmi works on copyright and patent issues.

“Both Jef and Rashmi were interns at Public Knowledge, and we are pleased to welcome them back. They will contribute immeasurably to the important work we do,” Sohn said.

My name is Michael Moreno, and I am a fall intern here at Public Knowledge. I am a 2nd year law student at the Washington College of Law at American University in Washington, DC. I grew up in the South Florida area and consider West Palm Beach my hometown. Unlike most people, I actually prefer the winter time and so I left Florida for a cooler climate. Unfortunately the summers in DC are just as hot. :-(

Whenever I have some free time, I enjoy reading a bestseller or a classic book or just unwind by playing a videogame. I am grateful to Public Knowledge for giving me the opportunity to work on issues that really interest me and broaden my knowledge and experience with intellectual property. Look for blog posts on topics such as White Spaces coming soon!

Hello, Public Knowledge world. This fall I am another in a long and distinguished line of interns here at Public Knowledge. When I am not at Public Knowledge, I am a second year law student at George Washington University. Second year at law school means that you finally get to choose your own classes, so I am excited to be studying Copyright and the Law of Cyberspace this semester. I am also one of those rare people in DC who actually grew up here, although I went to college out in LA.

I have always had an interest in computers and technology, and when I came to law school I realized that I could turn that interest into a career. I built my first MP3 server with a friend when I was in high school and have not looked back since. My most recent technical challenge has been getting Kubuntu to work on my laptop (so far so good).