(silence)
[Joe Salvo] OK. Thank you very much. Good evening. Welcome to
the Copyright Society of the USA's 43rd annual Donald C. Brace lecture.
My name is Joe Salvo, and it is my honor as
President of the Copyright Society to welcome you here
to Fordham University School of Law, and to
introduce tonight's honorary speaker Shira Perlmutter.
For those of you that don't know, the Copyright Society is a member run
non-profit organization. We are celebrating our 61st Year, and, uh,
lots and lots of activities that we, uh, sponsor - I would encourage
those of you who are not familiar to go to our website
www.csusa.org
for a totla schedule of everything that we're doing.
Um, each year the Society seeks to single out one of the leading
thinkers, writers, scholars, practitioners
jurists, or policymakers in our field, that has contributed
to the understanding, discourse, and advancement of copyright,
and to invite them here to New York, to give the
prestigious Brace lecture. Past speakers
are among some of the giants of copyright
and tonight's speaker is no exception.
Shira Perlmutter, for those of you who may not know, currently serves as
Chief Policy Officer and Director for International Affairs at the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office.
In that capacity she serves as the policy advisor to
the Undersecretary of Commerce for Intellectual Property,
and she oversees a number of critical functions, including
the administration and support for all domestic and international IP
policy-related operations, like our trade and treaty obligations;
the oversight of the Office of Policy and External Affairs;
congressional and legislative engagement is carried out
through the Office of Governmental Affairs;
IP education and training through her involvement with the Global IP Academy;
global IP leadership though the IP Attache Program; and economic analysis
through the Chief Economist.
Prior to joining the USPTO Shira served over five and one-half years as the
Executive Vice President of Global Legal Policy, in London, for the IFPI -
the International Federation of Phonograph Industries,
developing and coordinating worldwide IP positions on behalf of the
recorded music industry, and representing the labels before various
inter-governmental bodies including the European Commission.
And, while some of us tend to spend our down time in London
doing such pedestrian things as visiting the London Eye or the Tower of London,
while there Shira also served as a lecturer at Kings College at the University of London;
as a research fellow at the Oxford Intellectual Property Research Center
at the University of Oxford; as a trustee at the Munich Intellectual Property Law Centre