Use a mix of legal academics, licensing practitioners and technical operators. A person with relevant expertise can still have an institutional or commercial position; ask them to disclose it rather than treating any interview as independent certification.
| Suggested expert | Affiliation checked in a primary institutional or event source | Best questions | Perspective to make explicit |
|---|---|---|---|
| Pamela Samuelson | Richard M. Sherman Distinguished Professor of Law and Information, UC Berkeley; faculty profile | Fair use, ownership, evidence and policy limits | Academic analysis; ask about relevant current advocacy or advisory roles |
| Mark A. Lemley | William H. Neukom Professor of Law and director of Stanford's Program in Law, Science & Technology; faculty profile | Competition, substitution, remedies and bargaining assumptions | Academic legal/economic perspective; disclose relevant representations or conflicts |
| Roy Kaufman | Managing Director of Business Development and Government Relations, CCC; May 2026 authored article and biography | Collective permissions, repertoire coverage, licence scope and cross-border supply | Licensing-provider perspective; separate policy preference from demonstrated owner outcomes |
| Toshit Panigrahi | CEO and co-founder, TollBit; Copyright Society biography | Paid access, qualified demand, metering and remittance | Access-platform commercial interest; request evidence specific to the proposed service |
| Laurent Le Meur | Technical Director, EDRLab in its 2026 programme; programme. Editor of the published TDMRep report | Reservation signals, metadata portability and operational limits | Technical standards perspective; does not replace US counsel |
Reconfirm roles before publishing an eventual interview. Add an owner-side licensing executive with a completed, permissioned case study and an ML engineer responsible for deletion testing; neither role is filled by inventing a representative or implying an unidentified customer exists.