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

Kyle K. Courtney — Open Culture VOICES, Season 2 Episode 32

by Brigitte Vézina, Connor Benedict Open Culture

Kyle believes that “the artistic and creative expressions of humanity is the best way to experience our human efforts” and open GLAM makes this a reality for much more than what you can see on a given day in a museum. Open GLAM also helps drive more digitization of collections around the world in an…

Maarten Zeinstra — Open Culture VOICES, Season 2 Episode 31

by Brigitte Vézina, Connor Benedict Open Culture

Maarten believes that “Open GLAM is a necessity of a disbalanced copyright framework.” Maarten talks about how open access policies help institutions achieve their public missions. Open access policies in instutions provides good evidence that society and communities need access to cultural heritage to flourish. Open Culture VOICES is a series of short videos…

Marike van Roon — Open Culture VOICES, Season 2 Episode 30

by Brigitte Vézina, Connor Benedict Open Culture

Marike van Roon shares that “the main benefit of open culture is accessibility” because if you are not fortunate enough to be part of organization that pays for you to have access to collections and you don’t live in city with public collections it’s almost impossible to access a lot of cultural heritage. In this…

Pierre El Khoury — Open Culture VOICES, Season 2 Episode 29

by Brigitte Vézina, Connor Benedict Open Culture

“For researchers GLAM’s preserve primary sources” which is of great benefit when creating knowledge and research about the present and the past. Pierre talks about how open access policies in GLAM’s make knowledge shared and more widespread instead of just for the elite few with permission from the collecting institution. Open Culture VOICES is a…

CC Celebrates 20 Years of the UNESCO Convention on Safeguarding Intangible Heritage

by Brigitte Vézina, Jocelyn Miyara Open Heritage

CC celebrates the 20th anniversary of the UNESCO Convention for the Safeguarding of Intangible Cultural Heritage. CC’s community initiative “Towards a Recommendation on Open Culture” (TAROC) is designed to support the international community in developing a positive, affirmative, and influential recommendation enshrining the values, objectives, and mechanisms for open culture to flourish and, in particular, for open culture to serve as a means to safeguard intangible cultural heritage.