Joost Smiers

Joost Smiers is a leading expert on decision-making in cultural matters and new approaches to cultural and intellectual property. He is perhaps best known for his proposals to eliminate copyright and to break up large publishers, music producers, and movie studios in order to encourage cultural diversity and eliminate market dominance by a small number of corporations.

Smiers received his Ph.D.in Political Science in 1977 from the University of Amsterdam. He is currently Professor Emeritus of Political Science of the Arts and a Research Fellow in the Research Group Arts & Economics at the Utrecht School of the Arts, the Netherlands, where he served as Professor from 1985 until his retirement in 2007. He is Dutch and lives in Amsterdam. He speaks Dutch, English, French, German, Italian, and Spanish. He is a member of the AHRB Research Network on New Directions in Copyright Law, Birckbeck School of Law, University of London. He was a member of the board of trustees of ERICArts, the European Research Institute for Comparative Cultural Affairs and the Arts, and an expert for the Council of Europe in Moldova.