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Brigitte Vézina

Director of Policy and Open Culture

Brigitte Vézina (Photo by Victoria Heath, CC BY)

Brigitte is passionate about all things spanning culture, arts, handicraft, traditions, fashion and, of course, copyright law and policy. She gets a kick out of tackling the fuzzy legal and policy issues that stand in the way of access, use, re-use and remix of culture, information and knowledge.

Before joining CC, she worked for a decade as a legal officer at WIPO and then ran her own consultancy, advising Europeana, SPARC Europe and others on copyright matters.

Currently located in the Netherlands where she lives with her husband and two kids, Brigitte grew up living in eight different countries across North America, Africa and Europe but Montréal is where she proudly comes from.

Brigitte is a fellow at the Canadian think tank Centre for International Governance Innovation. She holds a bachelor’s degree in law from the Université de Montréal and a master’s in law from Georgetown University. She has been a member of the Bar of Quebec since 2003.

Photo credit: Victoria Heath CC BY 4.0

Posts by Brigitte Vézina

Coming Soon! Season 2 of Open Culture VOICES

by Brigitte Vézina, Connor Benedict Open Culture

Open Culture is a growing sector of the open movement around the world, with museums, galleries, archives and libraries increasingly making collections available and accessible online. The Open Culture VOICES series aims to shine a light on the leaders and advocates in the sector to inspire others and increase the accessibility and availability of cultural…

Pioneers of Open Culture: A look back at how open access happened at three early adopters

by Brigitte Vézina, Michael Weinberg Open Culture

Ever wondered how it must have been for some of the first cultural heritage institutions to embark on their open access journey? Michael Weinberg, Executive Director of the Engelberg Center on Innovation Law & Policy at NYU Law, talked to three major institutions that helped shape the early open GLAM / open culture movement to…

2022 in Review: a Look at Creative Commons’ Open Culture Program

by Brigitte Vézina Open Culture

2022 was quite a year for the Creative Commons (CC) Open Culture Program, thanks to generous funding from Arcadia, a charitable fund of Lisbet Rausing & Peter Baldwin, and the Samuel H. Kress Foundation. In this blog post, we take a look back at some of the year’s highlights in our program’s four components: Policy,…

CC Publishes Global Open Culture Call to Action to Policymakers

by Brigitte Vézina Open Culture

Since its creation in 2001, Creative Commons (CC) has helped release nearly 5 million digital open images of cultural heritage held in cultural heritage institutions using CC tools. We have also been promoting open culture to build a more equitable, accessible, and innovative world, and it is based on this rich experience that our Open…

CC celebrates 30 years of UNESCO Memory of the World

by Brigitte Vézina, Jennryn Wetzler Open Culture

This week, the international community celebrates 30 years of the UNESCO Memory of the World Program. At Creative Commons (CC), we applaud the program’s achievements in enhancing preservation and access to documentary heritage from galleries, libraries, archives and museums (GLAMs) around the globe. We laud the multitude of efforts enlisting documentary heritage to promote inclusive,…