RLUK Digital Shift Forum - Catherine Stihler, Creative Commons

#RLUKDSF

These monthly seminars will include high-profile international speakers, from a wide variety of backgrounds and professions, who are at the forefront of current thinking around the digital shift. They will provide time and space for wide-ranging, inter-disciplinary discussions regarding the future of the digital shift, and will provide a springboard for cross-sector collaboration. Seminars are open and inclusive to all, and you do not need to belong to an RLUK member institution to attend or participate.

Catherine Stihler, CEO, Creative Commons

Better Sharing

Twenty years ago, Creative Commons (CC) started with a simple, radical idea: to save the Internet from “failed sharing.” At that time, copyright law made it difficult for anyone who wanted to share their work across the Internet under generous terms to do so. Today we have created a powerful tool that provides the infrastructure for legal, voluntary sharing that creates a global world of shared and reusable creative resources backed by a global network and community with a pure motive: aiding creators to grant free access to science, culture and knowledge all in the service of the common good.

If 2020 has taught us anything, there are still too many barriers to openness and that there is an urgent need to create equity in access to knowledge across the Internet so that we can share and work together to face the challenges of today and tomorrow. At CC we want to explore what better open sharing looks like in 2021 and beyond. How do we best serve the public interest when challenges around equity, climate and AI loom large? In my talk I would like to explore our current thinking on better sharing at the heart of our new strategy and what this means for us as both professionals and human beings.

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Catherine Stihler OBE is the CEO of Creative Commons. She has been an international champion for openness as a legislator and practitioner for over 20 years.

She worked in the British House of Commons as a researcher before successfully standing for election as a Member of the European Parliament (MEP) for Scotland in 1999, representing the UK Labour Party. At the European Parliament in Brussels she became one of Scotland’s longest-serving and most respected legislators. She was elected Vice-Chair of the European Parliament’s Internal Market and Consumer Protection Committee, working on digital policy where she prioritised the Digital Single Market, digital skills, better accessibility of digital products for the disabled, and citizen online data protection and privacy. She founded both the Campaign for Parliamentary Reform and the parliament’s All-Party Library Group, promoting and advocating for the importance of libraries in the new digital age. Catherine took on a lead role in the debate on copyright in the European Union’s (EU) Digital Single Market, serving as Rapporteur for the Internal Market Committee and standing up for over 500million European citizens.

While serving as an MEP, Catherine was also elected to serve as the 52nd Rector of the University of St Andrews between 2014 and 2017, and will serve as Senior Lay member on the university court from August 2020. In 2018 she was awarded an honorary doctorate from the University of St Andrews. In 2019, she stood down from the European Parliament to become Chief Executive Officer of the Open Knowledge Foundation. Catherine transformed the Open Knowledge Foundation in just 18 months, redefining its vision and mission to produce a new strategic direction, reengaging its global chapters and increasing the worldwide profile of the organisation.

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This event will be held via Zoom. Attendees will be sent joining details the day before the event, and should check their junk folders if no email is received.