Flying Arts Event Calendar: Webinars

Your Facilitator: Darren Blackman is a proud Gureng Gureng/Gangalu man from Queensland’s central coast with Kanak South Sea Island heritage from Vanuatu. Blackman grew up in the Sunshine Coast town of Nambour and has been living and working throughout the Far North and Western Queensland since 1995. Through this work, Blackman speaks to some of the issues at the centre of the Australian Government’s Close the Gap campaign, that set intent to achieve health, education and employment equality by 2030 and reduce the seventeen-year life-expectancy gap between Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander and non-Indigenous peoples. Touching on oral history from his Elders and reworking those messages, Blackman channels personal observations and his lived experience, to witness a wide range of Aboriginal perspectives and mainstream political and media inference.

Your Facilitator: John Swinson is a professor at The University of Queensland in the Law School and he is the course coordinator for Privacy Law, Internet and AI Law, and Business in a Borderless World.  John also teaches cybersecurity law and copyright law.

John Swinson is a former partner of a major international law firm and has 30 years of law firm experience in NY and Australia, with principle focus on technology law and intellectual property law.  Currently, he is principal of boutique law firm Pie Legal.

After graduating from UQ with computer science and law degrees, John continued to Harvard Law School as a Fulbright and Frank Knox Scholar where he received a Masters of Law.  Barak Obama was a member of his graduating class.  John passed the NY bar examination and practiced technology law as an attorney in NY State.

John is a past President of the Australian Fulbright Alumni Association and was Chair of the auDA Policy Review Panel to introduce the new .au domain name space in Australia.

Since 2000, John has been an arbitrator for the World Intellectual Property Organisation (WIPO, which is a United Nations organisation based in Geneva) under the Uniform Domain-Name Dispute Resolution Policy (UDRP) and au Dispute Resolution Policy (auDRP).  John has decided over 690 domain name disputes.

John has represented artists and filmmakers in copyright litigations and dealings including:

• Richard Bell v Steele [2012] FCA 246
• TS Production LLC v Drew Pictures Pty Ltd [2008] FCA 1329
• Dais Studio Pty Ltd v Bullet Creative Pty Ltd [2007] FCA 2054