Help Wikimedia Map Your Efforts to Improve Copyright!

Modern and flexible copyright laws for the digital age are essential to help the free knowledge movement and Wikimedia projects flourish. This is because these laws and policies create the conditions in which we can freely and openly access, discuss and share, reproduce and remix knowledge and information.

Wikimedians around the world try to shape and improve their local policy environments in ways that will help them contribute to Wikimedia projects with articles, images, sound files, and videos, and add to the online information ecosystem by sharing digitized content from libraries, databases, archives, and more. What have we learned as a collective from these community-led copyright reform campaigns? 

It’s time to take a good look. 

The Global Advocacy team, in collaboration with others at the Foundation, wants to help Wikimedians have access to and learn from the work that communities and affiliates do to advocate for copyright reform. We are launching a mapping project to compile the public policy advocacy initiatives that affiliates and community members have pursued for governments to preserve or change copyright policies. 

We want to learn about our movement’s shared copyright public policy priorities, the common obstacles that communities face, and the campaign materials (as well as other resources) that Wikimedians have created or are creating as part of these advocacy efforts. Everything is helpful: We’re interested in your open letters, emails to government institutions and officials, presentations and infographics, public events, and alliances with other organizations. We’ll share these materials on Meta-Wiki as a collaborative repository of resources to inspire, support, build connections, and create synergies among advocacy efforts across the Wikimedia movement.

Do you know of an initiative that Wikimedians have pursued to convince governments to preserve or change copyright regulations at a local, national, regional or international level since 2016? Have you launched a campaign to change existing copyright policies that restricted your work on Wikimedia projects? What reforms did you ask for? What have you found works and doesn’t work?

Please let us know! Here is how to do so:

1. Send an email with the subject “Copyright advocacy mapping” to Valentina Vera-Quiroz, our Human Rights, Policy, and Tech Fellow (vveraquiroz-ctr@wikimedia.org) and CC Ziski Putz (fputz@wikimedia.org), our Movement Advocacy Manager. Let us know the time zone in which you are based.
   
2. Wait for a follow-up reply from Valentina or Ziski.
   
3. Schedule a time to meet with us!
   

We are very excited to hear about your projects, and to discuss and decide together how we can better support, facilitate, and highlight peer learning about copyright advocacy within our movement. We can learn from each other and work together, as a movement, to reform copyright across the world so everyone, everywhere, can benefit from the free knowledge of Wikimedia projects!