Evan Butterfield
Copyright expert

For over 30 years, Evan Butterfield, MA, JD, has been a publishing professional focused on explaining copyright law and applications to non-lawyer audiences. Evan re-ceived his MA in English from the University of Illinois-Urbana, and his JD from DePaul University in Chicago. In his first job out of law school, Evan worked as a legal editor for Lawyers Cooperative Publishing.

Seeing a job posting for a Chicago publisher seeking “a lawyer who can write,” he became writer-in-residence for Dearborn Financial Publishing, designing and writing textbooks and distance learning courses primarily for real estate professionals. After Dearborn was acquired by Kaplan Professional Publishing, Evan became Publisher and Vice President of Product Development, in which role he wrote articles and gave regular formal presentations about copyright law to industry audiences of real estate agents, educators, and regulators. Later, as Director of Products & Services for the IEEE Computer Society in Southern California, Evan was Director of Products & Services, overseeing publication of more than thirty magazines, scholarly journals and books on computer science, plus dozens of international conferences.

Even in such a diverse role, Evan continued to focus on copyright and intellectual property, and helped lead the development of the association’s licensing and open access policies. After retiring, Evan taught copyright and trademark classes for the Art Institute of Las Vegas, and created and taught an online course on criminal intellectual property law at Arizona State University.

Evan decided to take his message about copyright law to a broader audience in 2000, when he published the first edition of Copyright for Creatives. The current second edition is thoroughly revised and expanded, with updates to address current issues in intellectual property like AI.

Evan lives near the mountains on the western edge of Las Vegas, Nevada with his husband and cat, and is a creative person himself: he has been producing, publishing, and displaying his own odd art photography for many years.