Brigitte Vézina

Director of Policy and Open Culture
Brigitte Vézina 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

Implementing the Marrakesh Treaty in Latin America: A Look at the Experiences of Four CC Community Members

by Brigitte Vézina, Scann Copyright

Four years ago today, the Marrakesh Treaty entered into force. The Treaty is truly special in the international copyright law universe: it has a clear humanitarian and social development dimension and it’s the first international treaty that focuses on the beneficiaries of limitations and exceptions, rather than on the rights of creators or holders of…

Six Projects Get Funding from the Creative Commons Copyright Platform Activities Fund

by Brigitte Vézina Community

We’re delighted to announce the six selected projects that will receive funding from the CC Copyright Platform Activities Fund in 2020! The CC Copyright Platform is an active space for copyright advocates and experts to coordinate copyright law and policy-related activities. This year, CC launched an Activities Fund to support copyright-related activities by Platform members.…

Why cOAlition S’ Rights Retention Strategy Protects Researchers

by Brigitte Vézina Copyright

Last month, cOAlition S released its Rights Retention Strategy to safeguard researchers’ intellectual ownership rights and suppress unreasonable embargo periods—Creative Commons (CC) keenly supports this initiative.  Modernizing an outdated academic publishing system  Under a traditional publishing model, researchers who want to publish their articles in a journal typically need to assign or exclusively license their…

Artificial Intelligence and Creativity: Why We’re Against Copyright Protection for AI-Generated Output

by Brent Moran, Brigitte Vézina Copyright

Should novel output (such as music, artworks, poems, etc.) generated by artificial intelligence1 (AI) be protected by copyright? While this question seems straightforward, the answer certainly isn’t. It brings together technical, legal, and philosophical questions regarding “creativity,” and whether machines can be considered “authors” that produce “original” works. In search of an answer, we ran…