 Thank you. Thank you public knowledge. I Appreciate this more than I can say and I'm so very very sorry. I can't be there in person to receive it. I'm honored I'm flattered I'm often confused by people who say they're humbled by awards because The award is something is that does not humble one it Raises one up But this award is truly humble it because it makes me think of all of the scholars and advocates and fans Whose shoulders I have the immense fortune to stand on I want to give some special thanks to the organization of transformative works legal team Including Rebecca Tushnet Stance Stacy Lantane Heidi Tandy Casey Fiesler Rachel Vaughn and others who have come and gone and done fantastic work Want to thank the organization for transformative works founders who created a space for fans to be legitimate and appreciated and I want to thank the many many Fans who trusted me and given me a voice and IP policy that I would not have if not for them I want to thank the countless scholars and teachers who inspire me and the advocates like public knowledge who do what I can't to advocate specifically in in legislative spaces I Also, I want to thank my parents who introduced me from the very start to a Dialogic way of thinking about creation and innovation who instilled in me a belief and Understanding that humans are better when we work together And when we lift each other up and every question no matter how obvious or not obvious The connection may seem is about social justice and human flourishing The first conferences about IP gender We're called mapping the connections the first IP race and mosaic and IP social justice events Often featured discussions that were just about like how are these things even connected? but pioneers like with Tief and Tima and Maggie Chan and KJ green and Peter Yazi and Madhavi Sunder and many others who I promise or I hope I'm not forgetting but simply cannot list Make those connections clear. They made those connections clear so that those of us who Want to work in this area can really just do the work I've always thought of myself as a creator this is thanks again to my parents who just made that seem like a natural idea They were and still very much are Creators themselves Writers especially they write books. They write research. They write law articles in the case of my dad and law books They have written separately and together books on history and law Both wrote to my mother professionally and my father semi so about skiing and the snow sports and my mother's Best known work is dining with Sherlock Holmes a book about Victorian cooking drawn from The Sherlock Holmes canon co-authored with the Culinary Institute of America chef Fritz Schoenen schnoll So it's not bad that the first thing I ever published was as a preteen in a semi scholarly Sherlock Ian publication called the Baker Street miscellaneous. It was a book review of a Sherlock Ian alphabet book In other words fandom has been part of my notion of Creatorship since the very beginning. I went on to be a musician and a composer I wrote a symphony in college, but my chief exploits were as a jazz performer That is to say it's a performer in a genre where debt to others is At the core of everything the player and the performers do It's baked in to the notion of jazz that one is appreciating and basing one's work on what came before I Tell this personal history not because I think you're interested in my life story But because it reinforces that in my experience there is no creation or innovation without dialogue debt and appreciation I've been a Sherlock Ian all my life. There's a picture of me in a deer stalker and diaper as an infant But that doesn't mean I've been a fan as we know it for that long And I'm tremendously grateful to my college-era friends Especially Rachel and Sandy and Emily who introduced me to media fandom as we now know it They were among the first people involved with the organization for transformative works And they got me started from the beginning in an advocacy movement that I believe literally made the word transformative a part of a key to copyright vocabulary I'm also grateful for Rebecca Tushnat who suggested that I get involved with the organization for transformative works Which gave me the voice and opportunity to listen and learn that came along with that Perhaps the most powerful example of this was a study that the organization conducted in 2013 the PTO and NTIA asked for comments on remix and the legal framework for remix We at the organization asked our members and users to write in and tell us what fandom and fan works have done for them at the time the archive of our own Our fan work platform operated by the OTW boasted over 200,000 users Now we have over 6.2 million registered users It's still a volunteer run and operated organization. It's still nonprofit. It's still focused on Non-commercial works. It has the same size legal team. In fact, most of the same people But back to what I was saying about the 2013 study The responses that we got told us narratives of fan works literally saving lives from despair People who created fan works built their skills found their voice found their sense of self and their sense of belonging And this wasn't just because they were creating it was because they were creating In dialogue with other works and in community with others who were doing the same thing. I Don't mean to say that everything about fan works and fandom is rosy. It's not but Fan works help and in this study Was it was especially clear that fan works helped members of marginalized and underrepresented communities find their voices and Their sense of self-value They also happen to raise the value of the underlying works that they were basing their fan works on That was a side point It was impossible to read these submissions and narratives without being moved and the submission that we sent in to the the the PTO and NTIA Was Incredibly moving Rebecca Tushnet wrote that submission and I am Incredibly impressed by its content Not because of the great work that we did but because of what's so amazing about what the people said when they sent their responses That work that submission typifies what I've been trying to do throughout my academic career make connections between belonging and community and humanity and creation and intellectual property and to think deeply and critically about the ways that intellectual property law can enhance and undermine social and racial justice and to highlight the complications and harms of Overownership and under recognition of people involved in creation and innovation. I Don't think of my work in IP as a fight. I think of it as trying to shine light on legitimacy and humanity and the Indepent interdependency of a wide array of creators and innovators Public knowledge helps shine that light along with me if I'm successful I know public knowledge is and I'm immensely proud to be associated And considered much less awarded this award from public knowledge, especially in such a gust company Thank you. Thank you very much