Artificial Intelligence, Writers and the Law

Regan Smith is Senior Vice President & General Counsel at the News/Media Alliance. She is a recognized expert in intellectual property law and policy who has testified before multiple parliamentary bodies and spoken in other government, academic, and industry forums on topics including copyright, artificial intelligence, digital rights management, free expression, algorithmic regulation, and collective licensing.

Previously, Regan served as General Counsel and Associate Register of Copyrights at the U.S. Copyright Office. In that role, she oversaw an extensive portfolio of regulatory, litigation, and policy matters, including over 45 regulatory proceedings and several matters before the Supreme Court.

Immediately prior to News/Media Alliance, she was Head of Public Policy in Spotify’s government affairs group, leading global intellectual property and music public policy matters.

Regan teaches copyright law at George Washington University. She is a trustee of the Copyright Society of the U.S.A., the Chair of the ABA’s Copyright Legislation committee, and an adviser to the American Law Institute’s Restatement of Copyright Law project.

She received a J.D. from Harvard Law School and a B.A. in philosophy and political science from the University of Michigan.

Umair Kazi is the Director of Policy & Advocacy at the Authors Guild, a professional organization of over 15,000 writers. In this capacity, Umair oversees the Guild’s policy portfolio, including positions on copyright, collective bargaining, antitrust, and artificial intelligence. Previously, Umair served as the Guild’s Staff Attorney, and advised members on copyright, publishing contracts, First Amendment, and other legal issues related to the writing profession. Umair holds a J.D. from the University of Iowa College of Law, an M.F.A. in Creative Writing from Columbia Universit School of the Arts. He translates poetry from Urdu, with work published in several literary journals, and contributed a chapter on digital book piracy in the first edition of The Routledge Companion to Copyright and Creativity in the 21st Century.

Maggie Harrison Dupré is an award-winning journalist and senior staff writer for Futurism, where she covers AI and its intersections with media, information, and the internet.

Richard Eisenberg is a freelance writer and editor and co-host of the Friends Talk Money podcast. He was formerly Managing Editor of Next Avenue and editor of the site’s Money & Policy and Work & Purpose channels and a writer there. He writes The View From Unretirement column for MarketWatch and also freelances for Next Avenue, Narratively/Healthline and Shutterstock. He was formerly Executive Editor of Money, Front Page Finance Editor of Yahoo! and Money Editor/Special Projects Director at Good Housekeeping. He is author of How to Avoid a Midlife Financial Crisis and The Money Book of Personal Finance. He graduated from the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University and lives in New Jersey.

Arielle Emmett, Ph.D., is a writer, visual journalist and traveling scholar specializing in East Asia, science writing, and human interest. She is a recipient of the Fulbright Scholar grant to study and teach in Kenya (2018-2019) and a 2015 Fulbright Specialist grant to teach visual media, journalism history and online journalism curriculum for the Universitas Padjadjaran, West Java, Indonesia. She has been a contributing editor to Smithsonian Air & Space magazine covering the Chinese presence in aerospace, women in flight, and “green” aviation technologies.