Robin Gross
Robin Gross is founder and Executive Director of IP Justice, an international civil liberties organization that promotes balanced intellectual property law and defends freedom of expression.
Robin Gross has represented the Non-Commercial Users Constituency (NCUC) on the ICANN GNSO Policy Council since 2005, and she is a member of the Advisory Group to the United Nations Internet Governance Forum (IGF).
Robin Gross also runs a boutique law firm Imagine Law in San Francisco that handles entertainment, intellectual property, and cyberspace legal issues of a transactional nature
In 2005, Robin Gross taught international copyright law at Santa Clara University School of Law, where she served on SCU's High Technology Legal Advisory Board from 2004-2006.
Robin Gross began her legal career as the first intellectual property (IP) attorney for the Electronic Frontier Foundation in 1999.
She launched EFF's work on intellectual property issues and was the director of its Campaign for Audiovisual Free Expression. She defended in court 2600 Magazine, Norwegian Jon Johansen, and other people that published the DeCSS code, challenging the anti-circumvention provisions of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) as unconstitutional. She led the legal team who eventually won in the California Supreme Court upholding the right of Web publishers to post DeCSS against bogus trade secret claims.
While at EFF, she defended Streamcast (maker of Morpheus P2P software) in a precedent setting case over the legality of P2P file-sharing software. In another DMCA case, she defended Princeton scientists' right to publish technical information describing the weaknesses in the recording industry's technology to control digital music. She successfully represented ReplayTV owners (including the founder of Craigslist) against Hollywood's claims that their use of digital VCRs was illegal.
Gross and IP Justice are active at the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) and participate in meetings related to the "Development Agenda". In July 2005, she organized a campaign of over 138 international public interest NGOs to support the proposal for a "Development Agenda" at WIPO. IP Justice is also active on issues regarding WIPO's proposed Broadcasting (& Webcasting) Treaty.
In 2004, she organized an international campaign of over 50 civil liberties groups to reform the European Union's Intellectual property Rights Enforcement Directive. The CODE Campaign was successful in removing the directive's ban on technical devices that bypass IP holders' restrictions, and got the criminal provisions deleted from the final directive.
At the World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS) in Geneva in 2003, she gave a keynote speech at the World Forum on Communications Rights and argued that in an information society, communication rights are human rights.
Later in 2004 she went to Chile where she advised Latin American policy makers on how to implement the US-Chile Free Trade Agreement's IP chapter as harmlessly as possible and also went to Geneva to attend meetings to reform WIPO.
At WSIS in Tunis in 2005, she addressed the WSIS plenary and called for reform of over-zealous intellectual property rights laws. She also chaired two panel discussions on the topics of the "World Intellectual Property Organization" and "P2P and Digital Rights".
She has been active against the IP Chapter of the Free Trade Area of the Americas Treaty, and WIPO's proposed Broadcasting Treaty and is also engaged in the ICANN Non-Commercial User's Constituency.
In 2004, Managing Intellectual Property Magazine named Robin Gross one of the "Top 100 Most Influential People in Intellectual Property in the World".