Anne Wells Branscomb

Named a "cyberBrahmin" by Boston magazine and called a "national treasure" by John Naisbitt, Anne Wells Branscomb was a communications and computer lawyer, author of Who Owns Information? (Basic Books, 1994), President of the Raven Group, held guest faculty positions at Yale, Columbia, and Tufts Universities, and was affiliated with the Harvard University Program on Information Resources Policy.

Anne was one of the first policy analysts to use the term "information infrastructure," writing a paper for the Aspen Institute in 1975 entitled "Beyond Deregulation: Designing the Information Infrastructure," later published in The Information Society. She was at the forefront of developments in the law concerning the impact of computer communication and has led groups of lawyers and policy experts in several recent studies by the National Conference of Lawyers and Scientists and as a member of the steering Committees of the National Academy of Sciences Project on Rights and Responsibilities of Users of Computerized Information Networks and also the Project on International Intellectual Property Rights.

She died of cancer on October 4, 1997. In the final weeks of her life she finished a hard cover book entitled My Own Sense of Place: A Southern View with a Northern Exposure. A small stock of copies of this fascinating, amusing, and thought-provoking set of essays remain. Contact Harvie Branscomb bff@zgsw.com for information on their availability.

This website is dedicated to her memory and to the work through which she and many others have advanced the benefits to world society from the extraordinary advances in computer, communications and information sciences.