Siva Vaidhyanathan

Siva Vaidhyanathan (born June 16, 1966) is a cultural historian and media scholar, and is currently an associate professor of Media Studies and Law at the University of Virginia. From 1999 through the summer of 2007 he worked in the Department of Culture and Communication at New York University. Vaidhyanathan is a frequent contributor on media and cultural issues in various periodicals including The Chronicle of Higher Education, New York Times Magazine, The Nation, and Salon.com, and he maintains a blog, [1]. He is a frequent contributor to National Public Radio and to MSNBC.COM. He has appeared in a segment of The Daily Show with Jon Stewart [2] and is a fellow of the New York Institute for the Humanities and the Institute for the Future of the Book. In March 2002, Library Journal cited Vaidhyanathan among its “Movers & Shakers” in the library field. In the feature story, Vaidhyanathan lauded librarians for being “on the front lines of copyright battles” and for being “the custodians of our information and cultural commons.” In November 2004 the Chronicle of Higher Education called Vaidhyanathan “one of academe’s best-known scholars of intellectual property and its role in contemporary culture.” He has testified as an expert before the U.S. Copyright Office on the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. In 2006 Vaidhyanathan coined the phrase "Critical Information Studies," which he uses to describe an emerging "transfield" concerned broadly with the politics of information in contemporary, connected societies. He is noted for opposing the Google Books scanning project on copyright grounds. He has published the opinion ^[1], that the project poses a danger for the doctrine of fair use, because the fair use claims are arguably so excessive that it may cause judicial limitation of that right. ^[2] Vaidhyanathan was born in Buffalo, New York, and attended the University of Texas at Austin, earning both a BA in History and a Ph.D. in American Studies.

Selected books

• Copyrights and Copywrongs: The Rise of Intellectual Property and How It Threatens Creativity, NYU Press, 2001. (ISBN 978-0814788073)
• The Anarchist in the Library: How the Clash Between Freedom and Control Is Hacking the Real World and Crashing the System, Basic Books, 2004. (ISBN 978-0465089857)
• Rewiring the Nation: The Place of Technology in American Studies, co-edited with Carolyn de la Peña, Johns Hopkins University Press, 2007. (ISBN 978-0801886515)
• The Googlization of Everything: How One Company is Disrupting Culture, Commerce, and Community -- And Why We Should Worry, work in progress in open development on a blog [3], launched September 27, 2007 in collaboration with the Institute for the Future of the Book.

References