Siva Vaidhyanathan

Siva Vaidhyanathan is a cultural historian and media scholar. He is one of the most creative and authoritative scholars on copyright and intellectual property in the world, and an outspoken critic of draconian copyright law in the digital age.

Siva Vaidhyanathan is an assistant professor of Culture and Communication at New York University. He worked as a professional journalist for five years before going on to earn a Ph.D. in American Studies from the University of Texas at Austin and to teach at Wesleyan University and the University of Wisconsin at Madison.

Vaidhyanathan is the author of Copyrights and Copywrongs: The Rise of Intellectual Property and How it Threatens Creativity (2001) and The Anarchist in the Library: How the Clash between Freedom and Control is Hacking the Real World and Crashing the System (2004), whose premise is laid out in his four-part essay on openDemocracy, P2P: The new information war. In addition to his openDemocracy column, his work has been published in American Scholar, The Chronicle of Higher Education, the New York Times Magazine, MSNBC.com, Salon.com, and The Nation.

Siva Vaidhyanathan lives in Greenwich Village, New York City.

Profile from http://www.opendemocracy.net/author/Siva_Vaidhyanathan.jsp

Four-part Open Democracy series, with many responses, at http://www.opendemocracy.net/debates/debate.jsp?debateId=101&id=8