Intellectual Property Copyrights Expert Witnesses: 27

FORENSIC EXPERT WITNESS - PHOTOGRAPHY

Professor Jeff Sedlik has decades of experience at the highest level of professional photography including advertising, corporate, editorial and stock. He is a respected and acknowledged authority on photography having served as Past National President of professional photography's leading trade organization,  "Advertising Photographers of America". Professor Sedlik is also an experienced Expert Witness. 

Areas of Expertise:

Contracts Copyright Licensing Publicity Rights Model Releases

Lost/Damaged Film Stock Photography Business Practices Forensic Scene Recreation Forensic Image Analysis

Jessie Stricchiola has over 23 years of experience in the fields of Search Engine Optimization (SEO), Digital Marketing, and  Internet Technologies. She is the founder of Alchemist Media, Inc., a digital marketing consultancy launched in 2002 that provides various internet and search engine marketing consulting services, including SEO, website development, web analytics, and digital marketing strategies.

Ms. Stricchiola began studying search algorithms and digital information discoverability in 1997, and was first employed as a full-time search engine optimization (SEO) specialist in 1998. She is co-author of The Art of SEO, (O’Reilly Media, 1st Ed. 2009, 2nd Ed. 2012, 3rd Ed. 2015, 4th Ed, 2022), a treatise on the practice of SEO that has been used as required or recommended reading in courses at Georgetown University, USC, UCLA, UCSD, UC Davis, the University of Wisconsin, Syracuse University, the University of Mumbai, the City University of Hong Kong, and others.  

Ms. Stricchiola has been a presenter and/or moderator at various search engine and internet industry conferences since 2002, including Ad:tech, O'Reilly's Web 2.0, Pubcon, Shop.org, FOO Camp (O’Reilly), Search Engine Strategies, Search Marketing Expo (SMX), and others.  She is credited with having been the first to identify Click Fraud in the PPC (pay per click) industry in 2001. Her work on this issue has been featured in numerous media outlets, including NPR, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Wired.com, CNN Money, and in The Google Story (First Edition, David a. Vise).

Litigation Support - Jessie Stricchiola has been qualified as an Internet Discoverability, Web Analytics, and Search Engine Optimization Subject Matter Expert in two US Federal District Courts, the Federal Court of Canada, and various California Superior Courts. Her services include pre-file case evaluation and research, expert consultant (non-testifying) engagements, and expert witness testimony at deposition and trial including claims construction and related testimony for patent litigation. CV available upon request

Parties to Litigation: U.S. Government, Uber Technologies Inc., Google Inc., Microsoft Online Inc., Yahoo! Inc., Dyson Technologies, Inc., IHG Hotels & Resorts, FremantleMedia, and others.

Areas of Expertise:

Internet / Web Forensics Digital Data Discoverability Digital Content Archives Search Engine Visibility Click Validity Measurement Internet Investigations Website Traffic Analytics

Open Source Data Internet and Digital Marketing Website Development E-commerce Web Analytics Social Media - Facebook, Twitter, Instagram Intellectual Property - Trademark, Patent, Prior Art

 View Alchemist Media Inc.'s Consulting Profile.

Gabriele Goldaper has over 45 years experience in the Fashion, Garment, Textile Industry, as a retailer, manufacturer, consultant, and college instructor. Ms. Goldaper is a perceptive and articulate Expert Witness who has been involved in more than150+ Apparel Industry Legal Disputes. She has been deposed and testified in bench and jury trials and arbitrations, for both defendants and plaintiffs.

Ms. Goldaper has owned her own clothing manufacturing company and has held key executive positions in major public and private companies in Southern California. She has been a Management Consultant to over 200 new, failing or growing apparel companies, and completed assignments for USAID in Romania, Egypt, El Salvador, Moscow, Thailand and Bulgaria as an apparel expert.

Ms. Goldaper is a 30-year member of the faculty at the Fashion Institute of Design and Merchandising.

Areas of Expertise Include:

• Copyright Infringement and Trademark Cases
• Opinions on Originality and Substantial Similarity
• Fabric/Print Design, and Origin Issues
• Garment Construction and Design issues
• Customs, Practices and Operations of Clothing Business
• Financial Conditions, Valuations and Financial Matters
• Issues with Manufacturing Contractors/Factories: Domestic and Off-Shore
• Wholesale Distribution to Retailers and Internet Sales
• Quality Standards/Specifications used in Production of Garments

View Consulting Profile.

SERVICES: Audio and video recording authentication, enhancement, transcription, and analysis, including body worn camera and security video recordings. Acoustic forensic analysis, including audibility of warning signals, speech - voice comparison, and gunshot - weapon recording analysis (e.g., Taser, ShotSpotter).  Audio technology and patent expert witness/consultant. Forensic musicology analysis. Forensic field recording and analysis per ANSI and recognized standards.

EXPERTISE: Consultation in over 800 audio-video and acoustic forensic cases since 1987. Expert testimony over eighty times, in U.S. Federal and State courts including the United States International Trade Commission (USITC), and courts in Canada and International arbitration panels (World Bank-ICSID).

DEGREES/MEMBERSHIPS: Ph.D. UC San Diego (Computer Audio) 1987; Fellow, Audio Engineering Society (AES); Member, Society of Forensic Engineers and Scientists (SFES), Acoustical Society of America (ASA).

Michael Nranian, JD, MBA, MS has over 30 years experience focusing in Product Development, Intellectual Property, Patent Litigation, Legal and Technical Compliance, and Product Liability Litigation. He is a licensed attorney in Michigan, Texas, & the United States Patent and Trademark Office. Mr. Nranian is a Six Sigma Black Belt, Professional Engineer, & Certified Project Management Professional. He has an in-depth background and education in Law, IP, Electrical, Chemical & Computer Engineering, & Business. He has testified extensively as an expert witness in depositions, hearings, and trials in state & federal courts.

Mr. Nranian conducts Product and Technology Analysis, Patentability & Prior Art Research,and provides Technology & Litigation Support for Intellectual Property. His litigation background includes patent infringement / non-infringement under literal infringement and the doctrine of equivalents, patent validity / invalidity, prior art, & file-wrapper estoppel, for both ITC and Federal cases, including Inter Partes reviews. He conducts analysis of patents and products, prepares claim charts, & expert witness reports. This includes testimony and document preparation for cases before state, and federal court jurisdictions, and the International Trade Commission and the Patent Trial and Appeal Board.

Mr. Nranian is thoroughly familiar with all 101, 102, 103, 112, and other enablement and prior art arguments. His experience includes Technology Standards Boards and Licensing Authorities, Antitrust / DOJ, Technology Development and Transfer, Patents, Trademarks, Trade Secrets, and Copyrights, Licensing, Unfair Competition/Trade, False/Deceptive Advertising, & Lanham Act Actions, & Class Actions.

His Product Liability Expert Witness litigation background includes all types of Safety Systems, Electrical Systems, Fires, Accident Reconstruction, and Evaluation of Alternative Designs for Automotive, Medical and other industries. He has over 29 years of experience in Automotive Safety Systems, Sensors, Seatbelts, Airbags / Curtains, Seats, Diagnostic Systems, Crash Recorders, Crash Pulse Analysis, System Diagnostic, Fault Codes, Structure (including roof-crush and door) and front, side & roll-over systems (including sensing and algorithm development) for domestic and international corporations. He is thoroughly familiar with all regulatory (including FMVSS), and corporate due-care requirements, & preemption arguments, occupant kinematics, & injury causation.

John Peck has over 25 years of experience as a Software and Hardware Engineer, with over 10 years of experience as a technical analyst for hardware and software Intellectual Property matters. Through his experience as an inventor, he has been granted 10 United States patents.  Background Experience: Mr. Peck's prior hardware engineering experience includes system architecture, digital design, design verification, design methodology automation, FPGAs, ASICs, and complex SoCs using in IoT applications such as smart power meters. He also has a solid background in software engineering, including video game development, firmware, EDA tools, and system validation environments.

Litigation Support: Mr. Peck has drafted numerous claim charts and prepared expert reports for software copyright, trade secret, and patent litigation. Representing attorneys for plaintiff and defendant, he is comfortable researching and expressing complex technical issues.

Ideal clients are attorneys who need to understand how complex systems operate on the basis of produced source code. Mr. Peck is able to rapidly understand complex technical systems, identify gaps in source code productions, and explain source code operation in a way that most people can understand. His work products are highly detailed in their description of system operation, source code references, and claim mapping.

To date, Mr. Peck has consulted on a total of 25 cases.

• Consultant and analyst for multiple ITC 337 investigations
• Software source code analysis for litigation including alleged copyright violation and trade secret theft
• Hardware HDL/RTL source code and schematic analysis for litigation matters including patent infringement
• Patent evidence of use
• Reverse engineering of software on mobile, desktop, and server platforms
• Performed software and hardware IP analysis and composed expert reports regarding patents, trade secrets, and copyright matters
• Ran CodeSuite® and analyzed software source code correlations
• Reviewed client portfolio patents to determine likelihood of infringing use based on publicly available information
• Developed source code comparison and analysis tools

Education: 

• MS, Computer Science,  University of California, Los Angeles
• BS, Computer Engineering, Carnegie Mellon University

Please visit  John Peck's LinkedIn Profile for more detail.

View Bay2Sierra Silicon Services, Inc.'s Consulting Profile.

Rob Wallace has unique expertise in Trademark, Trade Dress, Copyright, Brand Identity and Package Design Infringement. For 35+ years, Rob ran one of the nation's top Brand Identity Strategy and Package Design Resources providing global branding expertise to Fortune 500 companies in virtually all CPG categories. His clients include P&G, Nestle, Pepsico, Unilever, Kraft, Colgate, The Home Depot, Brown-Foreman, Novartis, J&J and more than 50 market leading companies. Manhattan-based, Rob has been an expert witness for important litigation involving:

• Likelihood of Consumer Confusion
• Secondary Meaning
• Brand Valuation & Dilution
• Package Graphic/Structural Design
• Product Design
• Branding Industry Best Practices
• False/ Deceptive Advertising
• Corrective Advertising
• and all brand related issues.

Rob has commissioned literally hundreds of consumer surveys and is uniquely qualified to determine the results of all research. He has worked for attorneys on both the plaintiff and defense sides of his cases. He is effective and efficient with the average project report requiring between 10 and 12 hours.

Dr. Larry Chiagouris has a rare combination serving as a senior Fortune 500 executive and as an accomplished academician. He has provided expert testimony and written opinions on damages, marketing, advertising, intellectual property issues (including the use of survey research) for plaintiffs & defendants at major national & local firms.

Experience summary:

• Experience evenly divided between plaintiff and defendant engagements over 25 cases

• Several cases include elements of intellectual property issues

• Majority of cases involve elements of consumer behavior or survey research

• Majority of cases involve elements of advertising related strategies and tactics

• Majority of cases involve elements of Internet related tactics

• Majority of cases involve written opinions and depositions

• Written and oral testimony in several Federal District Court jurisdictions

• Engaged by both large multinational law firms and small boutique firms

• Class action cases evenly divided between plaintiffs and defendants

Selected by Agency Magazine as one of 10 best and brightest researchers. He brings extensive experience as a Senior Marketing, Branding and Research Executive responsible for directing major assignments for companies such as AT&T, Campbell Soup, Kraft, Miller Brewing, Peugeot, Pfizer, Prudential and Visa.

He has a Ph.D. in Marketing, is Past Chairman, Advertising Research Foundation and Former Director of the American Marketing Association.

Brooks Hilliard, CMC, CCP is the only actively practicing expert witness in the world who is both a Certified Management Consultant and a Certified Computing Professional specializing in computer system selection and problem resolution. He has testified more than 30 times as a computer expert witness and has been engaged on more than 90 such matters for both plaintiffs and defendants. Mr. Hillard has done expert witness and consulting assignments in 25 states, and has qualified as an expert witness on computer software and hardware (including ERP, SCM and CRM systems) in both state and federal litigation. His expert witness engagements have included courtroom and deposition testimony in lawsuits, arbitrations, mediations and formal governmental hearings. 

Areas of Expertise:

• Allegations of ERP and CRM system failures and/or defective business software/systems
• Computer Forensics
• Intellectual property
• Valuation of computer hardware, software and services
• Regulatory, Procurement and Tax matters

Howard J. Cohen, PhD, has over 30 years of experience in Software Engineering, Architecture and Implementation. He possesses particular expertise in Algorithms, Relational Databases, Graphical User Interfaces (GUIs) and Software Applications in general. His experience has been in a broad spectrum of technology, in several languages, in a wide variety of applications, and on multiple platforms. Dr. Cohen's background includes Electronic Design Automation, Bioinformatics, Digital Cartography, Banking Systems for Foreign Exchange Traders, and many more. He is the co-inventor on approximately 120 patents.

Dr. Cohen has over 15 years of experience as an Expert Witness. He possesses excellent written and verbal communications skills, including the ability to express himself well in interpersonal contacts, make presentations to large audiences, explain complex concepts clearly, and write well on levels ranging from the scientific to end user documentation. He is available to analyze complex systems, to write clearly about technical issues, and communicate face-to-face in a manner appropriate for any audience to understand the issues, the technology and the point of view. Dr. Cohen has been deposed and testified at arbitration hearings and in Federal Court.

Expert Witness Projects Include:

• Trade Secrets
• Copyright
• DMCA - Digital Millennium Copyright Act
• Patent Infringement
• Source Code Analysis
• Business Practices
• Damages Analysis
• Computer Software Security / Forensics

View Consulting Profile.

Oded Gottesman, PhD, CTO of Compandent Inc., technology IP expert witness in such areas as telecommunications, cellular phone, and signal processing, provides technology expert witness services, prior art search, and consulting for Technology Patent Infringement, Patent Invalidity, Trade Secret Disputes, source code review, hardware analysis, and related matters. Dr. Gottesman has more than 17 years of experience as an expert witness, deposed 14 times, testified 6 times in Jury trial and 2 times in ITC trial, worked on IPR and Ex Parte Reexamination petitions, and wrote numerous reports. Among his areas of expertise are:

DSP Digital Signal Processing Telecommunications Cellular Networks (4G LTE, 3GPP, GSM) Packetized Networks VoIP Streaming audio, streaming video Real-time Systems Cellular Timing and Synchronization Location and Position Systems (UTDOA, GPS, etc.) Error Control Coding

Speech Coding, voice compression, vocoder, Audio Compression, and Video Compression, codec (MPEG, AAC, AMR) Signal Compression and Signal Enhancement Computer Software, and Algorithms Computer Hardware Embedded Systems Smartphones, Portable Devices Client-server Web Applications Mobile Applications

Litigation Support - Dr. Gottesman has more than 20 years of experience as an expert witness, deposed 16 times, testified 6 times in Jury trial and 2 times in ITC trial, worked on IPR and Ex Parte Reexamination petitions, and wrote numerous reports.

Selected Clients - Dr. Gottesman's clients have included: Alston & Bird, AZA Law, BakerHostetler, Bracewell & Giuliani LLP, Comcast, Cooley Godward Kronish, Cummins, Dechert, Echelon, Fenwick & West, Fish & Richardson, Google, Hill Kertscher & Wharton, Kirkland & Ellis, Sidley Austin, Weir & Partners, Woodcock & Washburn, MagicJack, Microsoft, Milbank, Tweed, Hadley & McCloy LLP, Nokia, Parts Geek, Samsung, Toshiba, TruePosition, Vinson & Elkins LLP, Wiav, and Williams & Connolly LLP.

View Dr. Gottesman's Consulting Profile.

Sam Malek is currently a Software Engineering Professor in the Informatics Department within the School of Information and Computer Sciences at the University of California, Irvine. He has over 20 years of experience in academia and industry. 

Prior to his academic appointment, Prof. Malek worked for several years as a Software Engineer, Software Architect, and Programmer at a variety of companies, including the Boeing Company and PricewaterhouseCoopers Consulting.

Results of Prof. Malek's research have appeared in more than 120 manuscripts, which have been published in peer-reviewed scientific conferences and journals. These publications have been cited more than 9,000 times according to Google Scholar. Prof. Malek has received numerous awards for his scientific contributions to the field of computer science, including the ACM SIGSOFT test-of-time award (2020) and the National Science Foundation CAREER award (2013). 

Litigation Support - In his capacity as an expert witness in more than 40 cases, Prof. Malek has come across and testified about a broad range of Software Technologies and Intellectual Property, including Patent Infringement, Trade Secret, Copyright, Breach of Contract, False Claims Act, Software-related Criminal Activity, and Software-related Personal Injury.

Prof. Malek has offered testimony at trial, deposition, and arbitration on more than 30 occasions. He has drafted validity, invalidity, infringement, and non-infrignement reports, and also has extensive experience with breach of contract disputes, often involving software development projects. Prof. Malek has testified in high-stakes jury trials in various US district courts and has submitted declarations and offered deposition testimony to the Patent Trial and Appeal Board (PTAB) in the Inter Partes Review (IPR) of patents.  At trial, he draws on his teaching skills as an instructor to breakdown complex technical concepts in ways that can be explained to non-technical jurors.

Areas of Expertise:

Programming Languages and Platforms Source Code Analysis Techniques and Tools Software Architecture Quality Assurance Mobile Computing Storage and Database

Cloud and Web Services Software Security Web Application Distributed Systems Artificial Intelligence Operating Systems and Servers

Reasoning, Inc. provides expert testimony for trademarks, defamation, authorship attribution, and communicative malpractice related to faulty tests and surveys. Reasoning is a group of doctoral-level linguists and logicians with superior understanding of all aspects of language. We do linguistic and logical analyses of publications, newspapers, books, letters, interviews, advertisements, manuals, contracts--to identify meanings, inferences, innuendoes, bias, actual malice, damage to reputation, similarity to other documents, copyright infringement, plagiarism, breach of contract, authorship, and fraud.

As a specialist in educational testing, Dr. Habick provides expert testimony on educational practices related to fairness, bias, psychometrics, and flawed test questions or testing programs. He provides Linguistic Analysis of news reports and other communications and in the assessment of Violations of Legal, Ethical, and Professional Standards.

Dr. Habick testified as an expert witness in linguistics in the U.S. District Court, Trenton, in The United States of America v. Tyshon Bey. Dr. Habick performed linguistic analyses on defamation and trademark cases for Pisanelli-Bice, Las Vegas; Shumaker, Loop & Kendrick, Tampa; Seed Intellectual Property Law Group, Seattle, and Perkins Coie, Seattle.

Reasoning, Inc. also provided expert testimony on unfair testing, grading, and educational practices for Seals v. State of Mississippi et al.

Areas of Expertise:

Libel Defamation Slander Trademarks Invasion of Privacy Copyright Infringement Discourse Analysis Logical Analysis Logically Flawed Argumentation

Plagiarism Education Educational Examinations Bias and Fairness Psychometrics Authorship Identification Interpretation of Contracts Taped Conversations

Professional Affiliations
American Dialect Society (ADS)
International Association of Forensic Linguists (IAFL)

Eric Forister, PhD, is an expert Economist with testifying experience on market definition, market power, and damages. His expertise includes applying advanced statistical techniques to datasets, synthesizing information from documents, and designing and evaluating surveys. A Senior Economist at Econ One, he focuses on relevant questions to tackle complex issues with an efficient and effective style of communication. Dr. Forister also has extensive experience consulting on issues including royalty rates, irreparable harm, sampling, survey design, common impact, and materiality.

Ideal Client Engagement: For litigation-related matters, an ideal engagement would be providing an opinion on economics, damages, market power, or market definition; or providing pre-litigation advice on the economics of potential claims, or the merits of a survey. For non-litigation matters, an ideal engagement would be helping to explain the economics of different business models or consulting to those considering buying or starting an optometry office.

Experience: Dr. Forister has acted in a support/consulting role on over 100 matters. His support work has been a mix of plaintiff and defense work. Dr. Forister has designed and evaluated surveys for IP and marketing cases and worked on a wide range of other matters, including:

• Antitrust - price fixing, exclusionary conduct, monopsony, unfair competition, Robinson-Patman
• Intellectual Property - SEP, FRAND, patents, trademark, irreparable harm
• Marketing - false advertising, product labeling
• General Damages - breach of contract, bankruptcy

Education/Training:

• PhD in Business Administration (Field: Economics), Stanford Graduate School of Business
• BS in Mathematics / Economics, University of California at Los Angeles, magna cum laude

View Dr. Forister's Consulting Profile.

Monty G. Myers is the founder and CEO of Eureka Software Solutions, Inc.  Mr. Myers, with the support of his team at Eureka, has served as a testifying and consulting software expert witness in over 135 software trade secret, patent, and other technology related cases in both state and federal court.

After over 35 years in business, Eureka is a leading project-oriented, custom software development company based in Austin, Texas.  Eureka has built software products and business solutions for an impressive client list which includes members of the Global 1000, Fortune 500, notable private companies, and numerous high-profile start-up organizations.  Eureka has a highly successful track record providing state-of-the-art software solutions on a variety of technology platforms. Eureka has enjoyed great business success and has received multiple achievement awards.

As the leader of Eureka, Mr. Myers is truly a practicing industry expert. He excels at many expert roles including software expert witness, software trade secret expert witness, software patent expert witness, and source code expert witness. See Eureka's expert witness website for a list of all 135+ of Monty's cases.

Capabilities/Resources:

• Software and computer expert witness experienced and proven at offering expert testimony under-oath at trial, hearings, and depositions.
• Extensive work with counsel in the taking and defending of depositions, reviewing, and challenging the testimony of others, and assisting with and implementing an overall trial presentation strategy.
• Adept at taking highly technical material and effectively communicating it to counsel, the judge, or a jury in terms they can understand.
• Ready availability of Eureka’s experienced team of software developers and IT forensic specialists as needed to analyze or recreate relevant software or hardware platforms or scenarios.
• Regular use of proprietary and licensed tools and software to assist with source code analysis and performance testing, load testing, data recovery and extraction, metadata review and management, and e-discovery.
• Experience performing analyses supporting matters involving alleged evidence destruction where negative inferences, death penalty sanctions, or other relief is sought by a party.

Practical Implementations of Expertise:

• Review and comparison of software source code and functionality in relation to contractual commitments and requirements and/or protected intellectual property including, trade secrets, copyrights, and patents.
• Computer/software forensics – able to reverse engineer and reconstruct hardware and software environments from backups, remnants, and fragments of deprecated software. Eureka IT and Software development team is skilled at re-creating historical hardware and software environments.
• Investigation and assessment of software project bidding, planning and performance with particular attention to adequacy of discovery, specifications, cost estimates, schedules, and deliverables.
• Functional and performance testing of software against applicable specifications, warranties or industry standards using proprietary and commercial testing tools and techniques.
• Evaluation and use of both traditional and modern software development techniques and strategies, including creative payment structures related to software application/effort valuation and intellectual property licensing and ownership.
• Reviewing and exercising software applications and IT networks to expose and correct security issues and weaknesses. 

Applicability of Expertise:

Source Code Review Source Code Comparison Source Code Reconstruction Source Code Misappropriation / Theft Source Code Copyright / Patents Software Patents Trade Marks Software Trade Secrets

Antitrust NDAs Open Source Licensing Computer Forensics Mobile / Wireless Technology Cloud and Web Business Hardware / Infrastructure Contract Performance / Project Management

View Monty Myers' Consulting Profile.