We are thrilled to announce that Marvin Ammori will be delivering an address at this year’s Open Video Conference. Marvin is a Legal Fellow at the New America Foundation’s Open Technology Initiative and a Visiting Scholar at the Stanford Law School Center for Internet and Society. He is an internationally recognized lawyer and expert in the areas of Internet law, media law, freedom of speech, and cybersecurity law.

Before joining the Open Technology Initiative, Marvin taught cyberlaw and international and domestic telecommunications at the University of Nebraska College of Law, where he helped found the space and telecommunications law program with the support of U.S. Strategic Command. He has also acted as counsel on some of the most important cases involving the future of the Internet. As Free Press‘s first lawyer in Washington, DC., he was the lead lawyer before the FCC on the Free Press-Comcast net neutrality case, which has been called a “model of the free-speech battles of the future” and which shaped several years of telecom lobbying in Washington, DC. Marvin is also a Term Member of the Council on Foreign Relations.

Marvin’s legal writings focus on freedom of speech, security, and new technologies. His work has appeared in places such as the New York Times, Boston Review, and the Huffington Post, and he is a contributor to Balkinization, one of the leading blogs for legal commentary.

Marvin will address the threats to our essential communications infrastructure—especially online video.  Marvin will draw on his wealth of knowledge to help us examine the stakes involved in ensuring that video progresses as a democratic, participatory, and collaborative medium. He has been on the cutting edge of addressing legal issues in communication throughout his career and will be bringing his expertise to the questions that will shape the future of video on the Web.

Marvin will also be leading a session that will work towards developing a map that visualizes the many patterns, layers, processes, and structures of the open video ecosystem.

If you haven’t already, make sure you register today!

We are very pleased to to announce that Jillian York will be delivering an address at the 2011 Open Video Conference. Jillian is best known her for human rights activism, and currently serves as the Director of International Freedom of Expression at the Electronic Frontier Foundation.

Prior to joining EFF, Jillian was the Project Coordinator for the OpenNet Initiative at Harvard’s Berkman Center for Internet & Society.  There, she worked with volunteers and contractors around the world to carry out ONI testing for Internet filtering, blogged for ONI, conducted research, and coordinated  DDoS and Circumvention research.

Jillian also worked on the Herdict Web project, coordinating translation, blogging, and maintaining Herdict’s social media presence.

She is involved with Global Voices Online, where she sits on the Board of Directors and serves as an author on the Middle East/North Africa team, as well as Global Voices Advocacy.  She is also a member of the Committee to Protect Bloggers, co-founded Talk Morocco, and has written for a number of publications including The Guardian, Index on Censorship, BITCH magazine, SHIFTMag, Huffington Post, and Al Jazeera English.

Jillian’s talk will take a hard look at how video is enabling activists around the world—and also the risks it carries.

Video has played a huge role across the Arab world, from Tunisia where—despite the blocking of nearly every available video-sharing site—it has been used for info-activism campaigns throughout the past decade to Syria, where in the absence of journalists, citizen reporters upload crude footage from camera phones, documenting protests and human rights abuses.

Yet the popularity of video amongst the region’s activists is not without concern. Privacy remains a crucial issue as documentarians must weigh the benefits of making their story heard against the risks of exposing individuals’ identities. Reliance on privately-owned video-sharing platforms also presents challenges, as users face the possibility that their video will be removed if in violation of the terms of service.”

We are thrilled to have Jillian join us at this year’s Open Video Conference. She will also be participating in discussions about visual privacy and an effort to design software to help make human rights activists anonymous.

Register now, and be on the lookout this week as we release the full conference schedule.