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
Image attribution: Brigitte Vézina (Photo by Victoria Heath, CC BY)
Anonymous, “Prudence, Wisdom and Knowledge”, National Library of the Netherlands, Public Domain Mark. In December last year, the Communia Association for the Public Domain — of which Creative Commons (CC) is a member — asked the European Commission and European Parliament to consider the development of a Digital Knowledge Act. In this blog post, we…
In January we hosted a webinar titled “Whose Open Culture? Decolonization, Indigenization, and Restitution” discussing the intersection of indigenous knowledge and open sharing. Our conversation spanned a variety of topics regarding indigenous sovereignty over culture, respectful terminology, and the legacy of colonialism and how it still exists today.
2023 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. In this blog post we look back on some of the year’s key achievements.
In November 2023, the Court of Appeal in THJ v Sheridan offered an important clarification of the originality requirement under UK copyright law, which clears a path for open culture to flourish in the UK.
On Wednesday, 17 January, 2024, at 3:00 pm UTC, CC’s Open Culture Program will be hosting a new webinar in our Open Culture Live series titled “Whose Open Culture? Decolonization, Indigenization, and Restitution.” As we observed a few years ago, there is growing awareness in the open culture movement about issues related to the acquisition, preservation, access, sharing, and reuse of cultural heritage of Indigenous peoples and local communities (including traditional knowledge and traditional cultural expressions), heritage in the context of colonization, and culturally-sensitive heritage.