'Pirates, Libraries and the Quest for Copyright Reform' - Amelia Andersdotter and Ben White: CIPIL Seminar

This session brought together representatives from two very different organisations that have frequently advocated for reform of the current copyright regime. The objective of this session was to tease out the similarities and differences in the nature of each organisation’s respective criticisms of and objections to copyright law in its present form, as well as the similarities and differences in their preferred approaches and strategies for copyright reform. The session was held by CIPIL (the Centre for Intellectual Property and Information Law) on 15th November 2012 at the Faculty of Law. About the speakers: Amelia Andersdotter is a Member of the European Parliament for the Pirate Party in Sweden. She works with industrial policy in the parliamentary committee ITRE and is a substitute member of the committees for international trade, INTA, and budget control, CONT. She's the Patron of EPFSUG, the European Parliament Free Software User Group. She also works in the delegations for the Korean peninsula and the Andean Community. She is currently the youngest member of the European Parliament, and assumed office in December 2011. Benjamin White is the Head of Intellectual Property at the British Library. He has a background in publishing, having worked for Pearson Education internationally, as well as for Ordnance Survey. He is active in the Intellectual Property field within the UK having sat on a number of bodies including the BBC's Creative Archive Advisory Board, the UK Government's Creative Economy Programme (Competition and Intellectual Property), i2010 Digital Libraries Programme, CBI Intellectual Property Board as well as the Institute of Public Policy Research's Advisory Board on Intellectual Property and the Public Sphere. He currently chairs the copyright group of the Council for European National Librarians; he sits on the UK Intellectual Property Office’s Copyright Research Expert Advisory Group and is a member of the advisory panel for the Digital Copyright Exchange Feasibility Study. For more information see the CIPIL website at http://www.cipil.law.cam.ac.uk