James Bessen is founder and director of Research on Innovation, a non-profit organization that conducts, sponsors and promotes research on technological innovation. Mr. Bessen is recognized as an innovator and technology visionary in the electronic publishing industry, having developed one of the first commercially–successful desktop publishing programs. As both an economics researcher and a hands-on industry participant at different levels, he brings a unique perspective to the study of innovation. Mr. Bessen wrote the first WYSIWYG (what-you-see-is-what-you-get) PC publishing software in 1983 and founded a company, Bestinfo, to market desktop publishing solutions to commercial publishers. One of Mr. Bessen’s studies on software patents, co-authored with Eric Maskin (Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton), has played an important role in European policy deliberations.

David Evans is a senior vice president with National Economic Research Associates (NERA). He specializes in industrial organization, labor economics, and econometrics. Mr. Evans has co-authored three books, Paying with Plastic, Breaking Up Bell, and The Economics of Small Businesses, and has published more than 30 articles on antitrust, industrial organization, and labor in American Economic Review, the Journal of Political Economy, The RAND Journal of Economics, Journal of Law and Economics, The Antitrust Bulletin, Antitrust Law Journal, and elsewhere. Before joining NERA, Mr. Evans headed an economic consulting firm that conducted studies and provided testimony for antitrust, employment, and regulatory matters. He was also a senior research associate at Charles River Associates, where he worked on antitrust and public policy studies; an associate professor of economics at Fordham University; and an adjunct professor of law at Fordham University Law School.

Robert Hahn is director of the AEI-Brookings Joint Center for Regulatory Studies, a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, and a research associate at Harvard University. Previously, he served as a senior staff member of the President’s Council of Economic Advisers. Mr. Hahn frequently contributes to general-interest periodicals and leading scholarly journals, including the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, American Economic Review, Science and Yale Law Journal. Most recently, he is the author of Reviving Regulatory Reform: A Global Perspective (AEI-Brookings Joint Center, 2000). In addition, Mr. Hahn is cofounder of the Community Preparatory School––an inner-city middle school in Providence, Rhode Island, that provides opportunities for disadvantaged youth to achieve their full potential.

Lawrence Lessig is a professor of law at Stanford Law School and founder of the School’s Center for Internet and Society. Prior to joining the Stanford faculty, he was the Berkman Professor of Law at Harvard Law School, a fellow at the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin, and a professor at the University of Chicago Law School. In 2001, he was once again listed among the "visionaries" on Business Week’s "e.biz25," the magazine’s roundup of the 25 most influential people in electronic business. Mr. Lessig teaches and writes in the areas of constitutional law, contracts, comparative constitutional law, and the law of cyberspace. A regular columnist for the Industry Standard, he has also contributed essays to the Wall Street Journal, the Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, and the Boston Globe. His book, Code and Other Laws of Cyberspace, was published by Basic Books, and his newest book, The Future of Ideas: The Fate of the Commons in a Connected World, is now available from Random House.

Brad Smith was appointed senior vice president and general counsel for Law and Corporate Affairs at Microsoft in November 2001. For the past five years, Mr. Smith has been deputy general counsel for worldwide sales and prior to that had been responsible for managing the company’s European Law and Corporate Affairs group. Since 1996, Mr. Smith has led Microsoft’s anti-piracy enforcement work, including Internet-related issues, litigation in more than 75 countries, and the company’s anti-counterfeiting efforts. He has also played a leading role in the company’s international antitrust matters. Before joining Microsoft, Mr. Smith was a partner at Covington & Burling where he represented a number of companies in the computing industry. He had also been the European counsel for the Business Software Alliance (BSA) where he worked to advocate the adoption of legislation and international treaties to strengthen software copyright protection at the European Union, the World Trade Organization, the World Intellectual Property Organization and in more than 20 countries in Europe and Africa.