Members of the Board
Paul Keller - Chairman
Ronaldo Lemos
Catharina Maracke
Joichi Ito
Tomislav Medak
Lawrence Lessig
Jimmy Wales

Staff

Members of the Board

Paul Keller - Chairman
Paul Keller is the project lead for Creative Commons Netherlands, and joined the Board of Creative Commons International in August 2005. Keller also heads the Public Research Program of the Waag Society, a knowledge institute dealing with issues in educations, government, society, industry and technology. The Waag Society undertakes research and develops new concepts and software applications, and initiates public debates relating to old and new media. Keller serves as a board member of the Waag Sarai Exchange Platform, a collaboration with Sarai: The New Media Initiative, in New Delhi. The program encourages the exchange of information and ideas on the topics of new media, knowledge production and culture between Europe and Asia.

Keller has acted as an editor for various conferences, such as ‘WE SEIZE!’ in Geneva in 2003 and the Creative Capital conference in Amsterdam in 2005. He obtained a masters degree in Comparative Political Science from the University of Amsterdam.

Ronaldo Lemos
Ronaldo Lemos is the director of the Center for Technology & Society (CTS) at the Fundação Getulio Vargas (FGV) Law School in Rio de Janeiro. Dr. Lemos is the head professor of Intellectual Property Law at FGV Law School and is also the director of Creative Commons Brazil. He has an LL.B. and LL.D. from the University of Sao Paulo, and an LL.M. from Harvard Law School. He is the author of three books, including Direito, Tecnologia e Cultura, published by FGV Press, 2005. He coordinates various projects, such as the Cultura Livre and Open Business Project, an international initiative taking place in Brazil, Nigeria, Chile, Mexico, South Africa and the UK. He is one of the founders of Overmundo, the largest Web 2.0 initiative in Brazil. He is also a member of the Electronic Commerce Commission appointed by the Brazilian Ministry of Justice, curator of the TIM Festival, and monthly columnist at Trip Magazine.

Catharina Maracke
Catharina studied law in Germany and graduated from the University of Kiel and the Hamburg Court of Appeal with the first and second state examination. While studying she obtained a scholarship from the Max-Planck-Institute for Foreign and International Patent, Copyright and Competition Law in Munich to write her PhD thesis on the History of the German Copyright Act of 1965. During the legal preparatory service she worked for several German Courts, the German Patent Office and the Canadian German Chamber of Industry and Commerce in Toronto. After finishing her legal education, Catharina worked for the law firm Shearman & Sterling LLP in their Munich office. Afterwards she spent three months at the Institute of Intellectual Property in Tokyo where she did research and taught design protection and copyright law.

Joichi Ito
Joi Ito, an activist, entrepreneur and venture capitalist, has received much recognition for his role as an entrepreneur of Internet and technology companies. He has founded companies such as PSINet Japan, Digital Garage and Infoseek Japan and is the founder and currently the CEO of the venture capital firm, Neoteny Co., Ltd.Ito serves on the board of several companies; he is the General Manager of International Operations of Technocrati, which offers an Internet search engine for finding information on weblogs; and is Chairman of the software company, Six Apart. In addition, he is on the board of Creative Commons, Socialtext, The Metabrainz Foundation and Technocrati Japan, and more recently, to the board of ICANN, the Mozilla Foundation and the Open Source Initiative. Ito serves on various Japanese central and local government committees and boards, offering advice on issues relating to IT, and computer privacy and security.

In 1997, Ito was named a member of the CyberElite by Time Magazine, and in 2000 was ranked as one of the ‘50 Stars of Asia’ by Business Week. In 2001, the World Economic Forum chose him as one of the 100 ‘Global Leaders of Tomorrow’ for 2002. He is currently reading towards a Doctor of Business Administration degree at Hitotsubashi University’s Graduate School of International Corporate Strategy, in Japan, and is focusing his research on the sharing economy.

Tomislav Medak
Tomislav Medak is the joint project leader for Creative Commons Croatia. The licenses were ported through the Multimedia Institute in Zagreb, where Medak co-ordinates theory and research programs and publishing activities. The Multimedia Institute (mi2) is a NGO established in 1999 and houses a media lab, provides support to other NGOs in the area, publishes newsletters and provides net services. It also opened a ‘net.culture’ centre called ‘Mama’, which provides cheap internet access and a meeting and presentation space for artists, social, political, organizational and technological experiments. Medak studied philosophy, literature and German at the philosophy faculty in Zagreb. He is interested in social, ‘biopolitical’ and media theory, especially how new technologies and new media affect social theory.

Lawrence Lessig
Lawrence Lessig is a Professor of Law at Stanford Law School and founder of the school’s Center for Internet and Society. Prior to joining the Stanford faculty, he was the Berkman Professor of Law at Harvard Law School, and a Professor at the University of Chicago. He clerked for Judge Richard Posner on the 7th Circuit Court of Appeals and Justice Antonin Scalia on the United States Supreme Court.

Professor Lessig represented website operator Eric Eldred in the ground-breaking case Eldred v. Ashcroft, a challenge to the 1998 Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act. He has won numerous awards, including the Free Software Foundation’s Freedom Award, and was named one of Scientific American’s Top 50 Visionaries, for arguing “against interpretations of copyright that could stifle innovation and discourse online.”

Professor Lessig is the author of Free Culture (2004), The Future of Ideas (2001) and Code and Other Laws of Cyberspace (1999). He chairs the Creative Commons project, and serves on the board of the Free Software Foundation, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, the Public Library of Science, and Public Knowledge.

Professor Lessig earned a BA in economics and a BS in management from the University of Pennsylvania, an MA in philosophy from Cambridge, and a JD from Yale.

Professor Lessig teaches and writes in the areas of constitutional law, contracts, and the law of cyberspace.

Jimmy Wales
Jimmy Wales founded Wikipedia.org in 2001 with the philosophy: “Imagine a world in which every single person on the planet is given free access to the sum of all human knowledge.” In the years since, he has devoted his life to that goal. In the process, he pioneered the collaborative Web 2.0 model.

Wikipedia currently has over 2 million articles and is consistently in the top ten websites visited worldwide. In 2004, Wales founded Wikia.com to expand beyond Wikipedia to more general online communities and collaborative projects. In 2005 Wales was appointed as a fellow of the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard Law School and is a member of the Board of Directors of Creative Commons. In 2006 he was named one of Time magazine’s 100 most influential people in the world.

Staff

Elizabeth Stark
Project Coordinator

Diane Cabell
Corporate Counsel, Corporate Secretary