A quick postscript to my previous piece about Peter Menell’s Brace Lecture for the Copyright Society of the USA: this year’s honoree is none other than Shira Perlmutter, who will be one of the keynote speakers at our Copyright and Technology London 2014 conference on October 1.

Perlmutter has been an international copyright luminary for many years.  When I first met her in 2003, she was chief IP counsel at Time Warner.  Prior to that she had posts at the U.S. Copyright Office, WIPO, the Administration of President Bill Clinton, and Catholic University as a law professor.  After Time Warner, she went on to IFPI and the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office, where she is now.  (The USPTO advises the Executive Branch of U.S. government on all intellectual property issues, including copyright.)  She also has adjunct appointments at Oxford and the University of London.

She will be sharing keynote duties with Maria Martin-Prat, who is the chief copyright official at the European Commission and has an equally distinguished career.  The two worked together at WIPO.  They will also be on a panel in the afternoon on American copyright reform and its impact on the European scene.  I’ll be moderating that panel, which will also include the eminent American copyright litigator Andrew Bridges of Fenwick & West and the UK copyright expert Stephen Edwards of ReedSmith.

Other panels I’m particularly excited about include one on the role of ISPs in copyright enforcement, given that the UK is planning on implementing a graduated response regime that’s purely “educational,” with no punitive component as in France, South Korea, and elsewhere.  One of our panelists there is Thomas Dillon, an attorney — now at WIPO — who is one of the leading experts on graduated response programs worldwide.  We’ll also have an interesting discussion about the content protection methods that Hollywood intends to require for its latest generation of ultra-high-resolution (“4K”) content, featuring Ron Wheeler of Fox — known as one of the most stringent of the major studios on content protection.  And we’ll have a special keynote by Dominic Young, CEO of the UK Copyright Hub, to give us an update on that.

Please join us in London on October 1 – register today!