Contracts and Legal Issues for Publishers in a Digital Age

Roberta Cairney is the founder of Roberta Cairney Law Offices, based in San Francisco. Her practice focuses on transactions involving nearly every form of new, old, and emerging technology.

She has advised a wide array of clients on the use of new technology tools and innovative business models in distributing and developing content and services, including O’Reilly Media, Safari Books Online, Lucasfilm Ltd., Charles Schwab & Co., The Perl Foundation, Chronicle Books, and The Exploratorium.

Ed Colleran serves as the Senior Director of Rightsholder Relations at Copyright Clearance Center (CCC), the world’s premier provider of copyright licensing and compliance solutions. He oversees strategic initiatives focused on CCC’s publisher constituency and manages the development of content licensing solutions and new revenue-generating initiatives for CCC’s participating publishers. Ed also provides the vision for the advancement of CCC’s digital rights management services and is a key contributor on other long-term strategic issues facing the information industry.

An industry veteran, Ed is a member of the Society of Scholarly Publishers (SSP) board and served on Ed was also a two-term member of the board of the Software and Information Industry Association (SIIA). He is a featured speaker and editorial contributor on issues such as navigating copyright requirements and the challenges and opportunities of managing content in a digital environment. A regular speaker at industry events, Ed has recently presented at the annual conferences of ALA, Association of University Presses (AAUP) and SIIA as well as InfoToday’s eContent conference.

An nine-year veteran at CCC, Ed has nearly 25 years’ experience in the communications and information industries. Before joining CCC, he served as vice president and managing director of Larry Miller Productions (now iXL, Inc.), a marketing communications firm.

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Andrew Bridges is a litigation partner in the firm’s San Francisco office and concentrates his practice on litigation and strategic counseling with respect to trademark, copyright, advertising, consumer protection, unfair competition, trade secrets, Internet regulation, and media law.

Mr. Bridges is a highly regarded litigator who has been the lead counsel in a variety of notable intellectual property cases, including his successful defense of Diamond Multimedia Systems, Inc. in a landmark case brought by the Recording Industry Association of America to ban distribution of the Rio MP3 music player; his successful representation (in both the trial court and the U.S. Court of Appeals) on behalf of Stanford Microdevices, blocking Stanford University’s attempt to strip his client of its name during its initial public offering; the successful defense of CNET in a suit brought by Snap-on Tools to prevent the launch of the Snap!Online service; a victory for MasterCard in a secondary copyright and trademark liability defense relating to allegedly infringing merchants. Mr. Bridges also recently successfully defended ClearPlay Inc. in a landmark case brought by 16 Hollywood directors, eight motion picture studios, and the Directors Guild of America under both copyright and trademark law that challenged ClearPlay’s distribution of DVD player control software that allows owners of motion picture DVDs to skip and mute portions of motion picture DVDs to shield their children from violence and other offensive content during the replay of motion picture DVDs. He currently represents several of the best known e-commerce and technology companies in litigation and counseling over a wide range of issues.

Mr. Bridges also represented the Digital Media Association in its amicus curiae brief before the U.S. Court of Appeals in the A&M Records v. Napster case as well as the Consumer Electronics Association, Information Technology Association of America, and other trade associations in an amicus curiae brief before the trial court in Paramount Pictures v. ReplayTV. He was original lead counsel defending StreamCast Networks (the producer of the Morpheus P2P communication software) in the landmark case brought by motion picture studios and record labels in Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Studios v. Grokster.

On the counseling front, Mr. Bridges assists clients with branding portfolio strategies, e-commerce business strategies, and litigation risk avoidance. He has a broad understanding of global copyright, branding, and e-commerce issues with connections to an extensive network of local counsel around the world.

He serves as an early neutral evaluator for the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California and as a domain name arbitrator for the World Intellectual Property Organization in Geneva.

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William S. Strong is the head of the firm’s intellectual property practice. He graduated from Harvard College in 1973 magna cum laude and from Harvard Law School in 1977. He was admitted to the Massachusetts Bar in 1977; to the bar of the United States Supreme Court in 1984; and to the New Hampshire Bar in 1994. He is the author of The Copyright Book: A Practical Guide, now in its fifth edition; of the chapter on copyright in The Chicago Manual of Style; and of the chapter on legal issues in the Columbia Guide to Digital Publishing. His article, Database Protection After Feist v. Rural Telephone Co. appeared in the Journal of the Copyright Society of the USA, Vol. 42, No. 1, Fall 1994. From 1987 to 1996 he was Adjunct Professor of Copyright Law at the Franklin Pierce Law Center in Concord, New Hampshire. For many years, Mr. Strong has been active in the leadership of the American Bar Association’s Intellectual Property Law Section and he has served on the Section’s governing council . He has also been active in the Copyright Society of the U.S.A., serving as a Trustee and as head of the Society’s New England chapter. Mr. Strong was a Trustee of the Boston Athenaeum from 1987 through 2004, and a Member of the Cambridge Arts Council Advisory Board from 1993-1999. He is a Trustee of the Charlotte Palmer Phillips Foundation, a Trustee and Treasurer of the Navigator Foundation, and an Overseer of the Peabody Essex Museum.

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Biography coming soon.

Daniel N. Lewis is an entrepreneur and Vice President, Business Development and General Counsel of Wikia, Inc. Daniel co-founded ArmchairGM, a sports website, which Wikia, Inc. acquired in January 2007. Daniel is a former sports blogger and had several blogs of his own before the “blogosphere” truly existed. Prior to Wikia, Daniel was an associate in the Labor and Employment department at Epstein Becker & Green, P.C., in Manhattan and a freelance sports writer. Daniel earned his Juris Doctorate from Benjamin N.Cardozo School of Law, where he served as an Editor of the Cardozo Law Review. Daniel graduated from Tufts University in 2000 with a BA in Economics.