HORACIO E. GUTIÉRREZ
Horacio Gutiérrez is corporate vice president and deputy general counsel in charge of the Microsoft Corporation’s worldwide intellectual property and licensing group. In this capacity, Gutiérrez leads the group responsible for the development and maintenance of the company’s IP portfolio, including all of its patents, copyrights, trademarks, and trade secrets worldwide. This group is also responsible for inbound and outbound patent licensing work, and for the strategy and substance on IP legal and public policy developments.Prior to his current position, Gutiérrez was based in Paris, France, where he was Microsoft’s associate general counsel for Europe, Middle East and Africa, overseeing all legal, regulatory and government affairs matters in that region.Before joining Microsoft in 1998, Gutiérrez was a member of the international practice group at the Miami office of Morgan, Lewis & Bockius LLP, where he worked on international intellectual property and competition law matters, commercial law and corporate finance legal matters. Prior to that, he was a vice president of corporate finance for a leading Latin American investment bank.Gutiérrez is trained and has practiced law both in civil law and common law jurisdictions. He holds a Master of Laws degree from Harvard Law School, which he attended as a Fulbright Scholar; a Juris Doctor degree summa cum laude, from the University Of Miami School Of Law; a Bachelor of Laws degree from Universidad Católica Andres Bello in Caracas, Venezuela; and a Specialization in Corporate and Commercial Law from the same institution.Gutiérrez is a member of the New York, Florida, American, International and Federal District (Venezuela) Bar Associations. Gutiérrez enjoys reading and traveling around the world with his family. He is married, with two daughters and one son.
MARIA STRONG
Maria Strong is Senior Counsel for Policy and International Affairs at the U.S. Copyright Office. The Office of Policy and International Affairs (PIA) assists the Register of Copyrights in advising the U.S. Congress and executive branch agencies on domestic and international copyright policy matters. PIA also represents the Copyright Office in U.S. government delegations to international organizations including the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) as well as at bilateral meetings and trade negotiations on copyright issues with foreign governments. Ms. Strong’s geographic portfolio currently includes China and many countries in the Western Hemisphere. She also supervises the office’s international copyright work in dozens of countries around the world.
Before joining the Copyright Office in October 2010, she served 19 years in private law practice in Washington, D.C. where she represented companies and associations in the media, technology and entertainment sectors, providing legal analyses and policy advocacy on global and domestic issues involving copyright law, enforcement, trade policy and e-commerce. She earned her law degree (J.D.) from the George Washington University Law School, and completed her graduate work (M.A.) at the USC-Annenberg School of Communications and her undergraduate studies (B.A) at UCLA.
RONALD C. WHEELER
RONALD C. WHEELER is Senior Vice President, Content Protection, with Fox Entertainment Group (FEG) in Los Angeles. In this capacity, he supervises the negotiation of content protection technology licenses and the content security-related aspects of digital content licensing deals and oversees the company’s worldwide anti-piracy and copyright litigation activities. He also represents Fox at the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) and in a number of multi-industry standard-setting efforts, and is closely involved in domestic and international legislative and regulatory issues regarding content protection.Prior to taking his current position, Wheeler was Vice President, Legal Affairs for Fox’s Home Entertainment subsidiary, where he provided worldwide antitrust and anti-piracy counseling, litigation management and transactional work on a wide variety of acquisitions, licensing and distribution deals. He is a graduate of Yale University and the University of Minnesota Law School, where he graduated magna cum laude.