Dr. Townsend Gard is an Associate Professor at Tulane Law School, and Co-Director and Co-Founder of the Tulane Center for Intellectual Property Law and Cutlure. Her research on unpublished works was the starting point for the Durationator(r), and she continues to focus a good part of her time on expanding the core research for the software, including questions sounding 104A, Holocaust artifacts, and folklore. Her other areas of research having included podcasting the traditional classroom, Second Life and virtual property, and theorizing the public domain (co-authored projects with her spouse, W. Ron Gard). Her previous teaching experience include one-year as a Visiting Assistant Professor at Seattle University School of Law, where she was also a Justice Faculty Fellow at Seattle University's Center for the Study of Justice in Society in 2006-07 and a one-year Lecturership position in law at the London School of Economics, where she also held a Leverhulme Trust Research Postdoctoral Fellowship. She also briefly taught history (as a TA and then as a resent Ph.D. graduate) at the University of California, Los Angeles, where she was awarded a Collegium University Teaching Fellowship.

Since 2004, she has also been a Non-Resident Fellow of the Stanford Law School Center for Internet and Society. Her recent publications on these topics have been published in the Cardozo Arts & Entertainment Law Journal, the Journal of the Copyright Society of the U.S.A., Santa Clara High Tech and Computer Law Journal, and the Journal for Internet Law. She was also a guest blogger at Terra Nova, and for the three years blogged at http://academiccopyright.typepad.com, examining copyright issues in an academic setting. Her Tulane Law School blog made its debut in July 2007.

During (and just after) law school, she served as a clerk for David Gantz on a number of NAFTA arbitration cases, including the Chapter 20 cross-border trucking case between Mexico and the US, and she also directed a two-year multimedia project, "Preparing for Lives in the Law," with Dean Toni Massaro at Arizona.

Her doctoral dissertation examined the cultural expression of war in art, literature, memoir, film, drama, and other forms, with a focus on the First World War, and asked the question: what defines identity and membership within a war generation? She is currently in the process of turning this project into a book entitled The Making of a War Generation. While enrolled as a student at UCLA, she also worked as a professional actor in film and television.

Professor Townsend-Gard's teaching and research areas include Intellectual Property (IP survey, copyright, trademark, and international intellectual property), International Law (trade, NAFTA, globalization, ADR, trade and IP), Legal History and Theory, Comparative Law, and Property.

Matt Miller has assisted with the Usable Past Project since July of 2007, and he has developed the software that runs the system. He has also translated laws and flow charts researched by others and turned them into a set of logical statements that (basically) create a directed acyclic graph representing a finite state automaton. Matt is proud that the software is a general purpose tool, even though the representation language is not Turing Complete. This means that the same software could theoretically be used to power anything where the questions and answers can be represented by a directed acyclic graph (which is probably a lot of problems).

Matt respects combinatorics, and wonders what mathematical function describes the growth of this system. Regardless, N has become large.

Matt is a 2009 J.D. graduate of Tulane University Law School, and plans to practice intellectual property law in New Orleans after graduating and passing bars.

Prior to attending law school, Matt worked as a software engineer in New Orleans for almost five years, developing patent-pending video surveillence software and working with various web technologies. Prior to that, he attended Duke University, graduating with double majors in Computer Science and Psychology.

Matt is married with two children and three pugs.

Ben Varadi developed much of the front-end interface for the Durationator site; and assists in information architecture and strategic planning phases of the Usable Past Project. Ben holds a BA in "Social Technology" from Burlington College, and has devoted the majority of his professional, academic, and volunteer work over the last ten years to understanding the social impact of communication technologies- with a focus on how new media tools can empower communities in need.

Ben is a 2009 graduate of Tulane University Law School. Ben first arrived in New Orleans shortly after Hurricane Katrina, and before law school served as fulltime volunteer Technology Coordinator for grassroots relief NGO Common Ground, and as Local Technology Coordinator for TechNOLA- a Microsoft-funded hurricane recovery project jointly administered by the Louisiana Association of Nonprofit Organizations and national IT nonprofit NPower. Previously, Ben worked as a freelance social technology advisor to enterprise and nonprofit entities across the country.

In his (largely hypothetical) free time, he enjoys backcountry hiking, plays the violin, studies JKA Shotokan Karate, and is restoring a 1978 Ford F-150.

Justin Levy has assisted with the Usable Past Project since January of 2008. He has been involved in proofing the paths that lead to the proper copyright duration and has written explanations to help the User determine the correct answer to each query.

Justin is a 2009 graduate of Tulane University. In addition to working with the Usable Past Project, he is interning with the New Orleans BioInnovation Center, an organization that is seeking to grow a biotech industry in Louisiana. There, he conducts market analyses, drafts provisional patents, and advises scientists. He has interned with Entergy where he did legal research on trademark infringement, casualty litigation, the right of appeal, and how to plan a construction project of a nuclear facility regulated by the Louisiana Public Service Commission. Furthermore, he has volunteered with the Pro Bono Project where he connected attorneys with indigent clients in need of legal assistance, and assisted indigent clients with paperwork for administrative agencies.

Prior to attending law school, he received his undergraduate degree in Biomedical Engineering at Boston University and worked in Cognitive Science and Molecular Biology labs.

Evan is awesome.

Amiel Provosty is a law student at Tulane. When he is not researching copyright issues he is pursuing a course load based on speech and other civil rights, entertainment law, intellectual property and business planning. Prior to pursuing a J.D. in New Orleans he worked as an audio engineer and theater technician around the Midwest and abroad in India. He has two young daughters and expects that both of them will be as interested in the arts as he is.

Amiel researched the substantive law on copyrights in sound recordings and music, and provided other organizational and archival assistance.

Michael N. Aisen graduated from Tulane University Law School in May, 2008 and is now practicing law in Las Vegas, Nevada. Michael researched the differences in copyright law in different nations as well as international perspectives on copyright protection for works of folklore and traditional knowledge.

Stavros Panagoulopoulos is from New York City. He is a rising 3L at Tulane Law School and plans upon graduation to do criminal defense work and litigation upon. Stavros feels it has been a very educational experience fulfilling his part as a record compiler and archivist for the project, as he has had a chance to get a very hands-on look at copyright issues and the reasons why sometimes no one can tell if something is in the public domain. He looks forward to using this experience as something to build on, as later on in his career he has in developing a Boxing/MMA promotion business, which will require knowing a thing or two about copyright.