Dr. Michael Geist is a law professor at the University of Ottawa where he holds the Canada Research Chair in Internet and E-commerce Law.

RightsCon is an annual conference that focuses on awareness-raising, organising, and advocacy on global issues at the intersection of technology and human rights. The event is produced by the international nonprofit organization AccessNow. RightsCon participants include members of digital rights organisations, legal experts, civil society, government, and business representatives. Creative Commons, Mozilla, and the Wikimedia…

Last week COMMUNIA launched the rightcopyright.eu campaign in order to support a better copyright for education. Let’s raise our voices and spread the word about this petition so we can influence European legislators in creating a better copyright for education.

In January we urged the new Librarian of Congress, Dr. Carla Hayden, to make sure that whoever she appoints as the next Register of Copyrights should put the public at the center of the work of the Copyright Office. Currently the Register leads the Copyright Office, an institution that sits within the Library of Congress.…

The current dominant public policy discourse on the internet and human rights addresses the importance of the these new technologies to empower civil liberties.

During Fair Use Week organizations and individuals are publishing blog posts, hosting workshops, and sharing educational resources about the implementation and importance of this essential limitation to the rights endowed by copyright. Fair use (and in other countries, the related “fair dealing”) is a flexible legal tool that permits some uses of copyrighted material without…

The Library of Congress in an incredible institution in the United States, serving as the research library for Congress, and stewarding an unparalleled collection of books and cultural works of all types. Over the last several years, groups have called on the library to make technology and policy changes to remain relevant in the 21st century, in order to…

Why are students criminalized for sharing knowledge? Over the last two years several organizations have been highlighting the situation of Colombian graduate student Diego Gomez, who is being criminally prosecuted for sharing a research article online. Gomez is a student in conservation and wildlife management, and for the most part has poor access to many…

The “Safe harbor” provisions on the DMCA have been critical to build the internet as we know it today.

Today the U.S. Department of State released the Federal Open Licensing Playbook, a list of considerations, use cases, and recommendations for federal departments interested in developing and implementing open license requirements on federally-funded grant projects. It is designed to assist federal efforts to maximize the impact of grant funds, and create opportunities for innovation and…