John Perry Barlow

John Perry Barlow is a former Wyoming rancher and Grateful Dead lyricist. A co-founder of EFF, he was the first to apply the term cyberspace to the "place" it presently describes. He has written for a diversity of publications, including Communications of the ACM, Mondo 2000, The New York Times, and Time. He has been on the masthead of Wired magazine since it was founded. His piece on the future of copyright, "The Economy of Ideas," is taught in many law schools, and his "Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace" is posted on thousands of websites. In 1997, he was a Fellow at Harvard's Institute of Politics and has been, since 1998, a Berkman Fellow at the Harvard Law School. John works actively with several consulting groups, including Diamond Technology Partners, Vanguard, and Global Business Network. In 1999, FutureBanker Magazine named him "One of the 25 Most Influential People in Financial Services." Barlow met Grateful Dead’s Bob Weir when he was a student at Fountain Valley School in Colorado. The two began co-writing songs years later after a feud between Weir and the band’s lyricist at the time, Robert Hunter. The writer then turned into an internet pioneer, publishing the cyberlibertanian “A Declaration of Independence of Cyberspace” in 1996, which calls for a government-free internet. He also co-founded the Freedom of the Press Foundation, working actively to support free speech in the press. Barlow is survived by his three daughters.