Later this week in Toronto we’ll be joining hundreds of Creative Commons community members, supporters, and activists at the CC Global Summit. The summit program will feature keynotes and a variety of sessions organized around five tracks, including Policy & Advocacy, the Useable Commons, Community & Movement, Spheres of Open, and the Future of the Commons.
We’ll be joining many of the sessions, especially in the Policy & Advocacy track. As Lisette explained last week, the Policy & Advocacy track will focus on sharing information about our work in support of copyright reform and commons advocacy, and increasing the effectiveness of our community in the current and future hotbeds of law and policy change. These are exactly the areas in which COMMUNIA has been working since the summer of 2014, when we rebooted as an advocacy team to respond to the then-upcoming reform of the EU copyright rules. We know that other governments around the world are engaged in (or planning) updates to rules that govern the creation and sharing of creativity and knowledge. Some of these changes acknowledge the importance of user rights in the digital and online world, but many of the proposals only call for an increase in protection and enforcement of copyright that benefits powerful rights holders and content publishers.
At the summit, we’ll share our experiences in education and advocacy efforts around copyright reform in the EU. And we’ll listen to, discuss, and work with community members who are engaging in similar initiatives elsewhere. There are plenty of interesting and useful sessions around these topics, including:
- Fixing Copyright for Education
- Copyright Reform Community on the 2017 Canadian Copyright Review
- Copyright and Trade Deals: How to Advocate for a Progressive Agenda?
- Campaigning for Copyright Reform: New Perspectives and Lessons Learned
- OMG OFG! Open, Flexible and General Copyright User Rights
- Kickstarting a CC-wide Copyright Reform Platform in Support of the Commons
A unifying theme of the CC Summit will be the discussion and adoption of a new structure for working together as a global community. CC has been working on these proposed changes for the last 18 months, and recently completed a public consultation on it. The point of the shift is to be more inclusive to new people and organisations that wish to contribute the Creative Commons project, and to promote collaboration among supporters and advocates worldwide. This is especially important in areas of law and policy reform, where collaboration and collective action can push for policies that strengthen the commons. We hope that as a result of the Summit, will provide the community with the venues for discussion and planning to mobilise action for copyright reform.
