The QCO Team

Karl Fogel

Karl Fogel is an open source developer, author, and copyright reform activist. After working on CVS [2] and writing "Open Source Development With CVS" [3] (Coriolis, 1999), he went to CollabNet, Inc [4] as a founding developer in the Subversion [5] project. Based on his experiences there, he wrote "Producing Open Source Software: How to Run a Successful Free Software Project" [6] (O'Reilly, 2005). After a brief stint as an Open Source Specialist at Google in 2006, he decided to work full-time on copyright reform and founded QuestionCopyright.org. He writes and speaks regularly on copyright, open source, and the application of open source principles to areas outside software.

Karl Fogel serves as President and Secretary.

Jeff Ubois

Jeff Ubois [7] is director of archival solutions at Intelligent Television, a producer of educational video materials funded by the Hewlett Foundation. He is also an advisor to Preserving Digital Public Television based at WNET in New York. Earlier, he was staff research associate at the School of Information Management and Systems at the University of California, Berkeley, where he developed approaches to measure the accessibility of archival holdings. For the Internet Archive, he has helped to develop policies for handling violent images, maintaining archival integrity, and managing usage data. He writes about issues in television archiving and digital video at http://www.archival.tv [8]. His articles have appeared in First Monday, the Journal of Digital Information, Release 1.0, ComputerWorld, and the publications of Ferris Research, a San Francisco-based consultancy specializing in collaboration software.

Jeff Ubois serves as Treasurer.

Bob Ostertag

Composer, performer, historian, instrument builder, journalist, activist, kayak instructor Bob Ostertag's [10] work cannot easily be summarized or pigeon-holed. He has published 21 CDs of music, two movies, two DVDs, and two books. His writings on contemporary politics have been published on every continent and in many languages. Electronic instruments of his own design are at the cutting edge of both music and video performance technology. He has performed at music, film, and multi-media festivals around the globe. His radically diverse collaborators include the Kronos Quartet, avant garder John Zorn, heavy metal star Mike Patton, jazz great Anthony Braxton, dyke punk rocker Lynn Breedlove, drag diva Justin Bond, Quebecois film maker Pierre Hébert, and others. He is rumored to have connections to the shadowy media guerrilla group The Yes Men. In March 2006 Ostertag made all of his recordings to which he owns the rights available as free digital downloads [11] under a Creative Commons license, and in October 2007 he released his new album w00t [12] online for free distribution. He is currently Professor of Technocultural Studies and Music at the University of California at Davis.

Shinjoung Yeo

ShinJoung Yeo is Coordinator for Reference and Outreach Services in the Stanford University Library, and also serves as Bibliographer for Communication in the Social Sciences Resource Group. She is also a founding member of Radical Reference [14], a collective of volunteer library workers who use their professional skills to answer information needs from the general public, independent journalists, and activists. She was named 2005 Library Journal Mover & Shaker [15] with her husband James Jacobs. She holds both a bachelors (1999) and masters (2002) degree in Journalism and Communications from the University of Oregon. She previously worked as a reference librarian at the University of California at San Diego and the San Diego Community College District Libraries, and as a news reporter for Korean-American Television in Los Angeles. In September of 2007 she and James Jacobs took the Internet Archive's Bookmobile on a tour of Northern California [16], bringing a demonstration of print-on-demand services to communities that do not have easy access to a wide variety of printed materials.

James Jacobs

James Jacobs is International Documents Librarian at Stanford University Library. Before coming to Stanford, he was state, local and international government information librarian at UC San Diego. He received his MSLIS from the University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign in 2002, and is a member of Beta Phi Mu. He is very active in the library community, concentrating on issues that affect society at large, such as fair use, open access to scholarly research, and permanent access to government information. Jacobs is a member of the Government Documents Roundtable [18] (GODORT) of the American Library Association. He is former chair of GODORT's Government Information Technology Committee (GITCO) and has served on the State and Local Documents Taskforce (SLDTF) and the Publications Committee. He was named 2005 Library Journal Mover & Shaker [15] with his wife Shinjoung Yeo, for their continuing work as founders of Radical Reference [14]. He has also been involved in the Urbana-Champaign Independent Media Center [19], and co-founded Free Government Information [20].

Brewster Kahle

Brewster Kahle is an Internet entrepreneur, activist, philanthropist and digital librarian/archivist. Kahle graduated from MIT in 1982 with a degree in computer engineering, having studied artificial intelligence with Marvin Minsky and W. Daniel Hillis. He was an early member of the Thinking Machines team, where he invented the Wide Area Information Server (WAIS) system; he later started WAIS, Inc., the nonprofit Internet Archive [22], and Alexa Internet. In 2005, Kahle was elected a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He is a Director of the Internet Archive, a member of the Board of Directors of the Electronic Frontier Foundation [23], and one of the initiators of the Open Content Alliance [24]. He and his wife also created the Kahle/Austin Foundation, which has supported the Internet Archive, Public Knowledge [25], and Creative Commons [26], among others. Kahle's stated mission is "Universal Access to all Knowledge".

Karen M. Sandler

Karen M. Sandler is a counsel at the Software Freedom Law Center [27]. She formerly worked as an associate in the corporate departments of Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher LLP in New York and Clifford Chance in New York and London. Sandler received her law degree from Columbia Law School in 2000, where she was a James Kent Scholar and co-founder of the Columbia Science and Technology Law Review. Sandler received her bachelor's degree in engineering from The Cooper Union. She is admitted to practice in the State of New York. She is also an officer of the Software Freedom Conservancy [28].

Karen M. Sandler serves as legal counsel (pro bono) for QuestionCopyright.org.