Siva Vaidhyanathan is a cultural historian and media scholar. He is one of the most creative and authoritative scholars on copyright and intellectual property in the world, and an outspoken critic of draconian copyright law in the digital age.

Siva Vaidhyanathan is an assistant professor of Culture and Communication at New York University. He worked as a professional journalist for five years before going on to earn a Ph.D. in American Studies from the University of Texas at Austin and to teach at Wesleyan University and the University of Wisconsin at Madison.

Vaidhyanathan is the author of Copyrights and Copywrongs: The Rise of Intellectual Property and How it Threatens Creativity (2001) and The Anarchist in the Library: How the Clash between Freedom and Control is Hacking the Real World and Crashing the System (2004), whose premise is laid out in his four-part essay on openDemocracy, P2P: The new information war. In addition to his openDemocracy column, his work has been published in American Scholar, The Chronicle of Higher Education, the New York Times Magazine, MSNBC.com, Salon.com, and The Nation.

Siva Vaidhyanathan lives in Greenwich Village, New York City.

Recent articles

Since its inception openDemocracy has set the standard for accessible and informed deliberation of globally important issues. Now it is truly both open and democratic. Siva Vaidhyanathan welcomes openDemocracy to the Creative Commons.

The eleventh and last of his “Remote Control” columns finds Siva Vaidhyanathan contrite over the American election result, and worried about the frightened and angry country it reflects.

The United States experienced real democracy only from 1965-2000, from the civil rights era to the post-Florida judicial coup, says Siva Vaidhyanathan. Whatever the result on 2 November, American citizens need to seize the responsibility of remaking it.

The impact of new technologies makes a fair voting, recording and counting system even more essential to a healthy democratic process. Recent international experience, says Siva Vaidhyanathan, highlights four guiding principles that should be followed: trust, accountability, openness, and universality. How does the United States measure up?

The “anarchist activists” protesting the Republican party convention in New York are not the dangerous radicals of news media and mayoral imagination. Real anarchists are just like folks – and their quiet influence is spreading through the culture.